More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a...

I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.

The easy assumption that we have remembered the most important people and events and have preserved the most valuable evidence is immediately trumped by our inability to know what we have forgotten.

Time, the thing we can't beat back... Yet, time is also what it takes to heal, what it takes for certain memory cells to die. Maybe time doesn't heal. Maybe it doesn't even pass. We pass through time,...

That's why you have to go and guilt him for all the trouble. It can't be your fault that you lost your memory if he wasn't smart enough to tell you about the wine.

In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody's memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory,...

Can we account for instinct?' said Monte Cristo. 'Are there not some places where we seem to breathe sadness? - why, we cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections - an idea which carries you back to...

I do not know, nor do I care to remember The time in which I knew distinctly that you were gone You fade in and out of memory Upon which I can not feign to touch Or feel How cruel to leave me With...

I cannot remember you when the rain flows down - I cannot remember you and my heart begins to drown ...

Memory fills my night Help make my pain and memories light In your arms I find comfort Guide me in my days Hold me in Thy arms Help me Lord, this night

For she was the only one, of all of them, to have spared me a pleasant word; and suddenly I longed for time to pass, not for its own sake, but as it would take me back to her.

Can these signs and symbols still speak? Images, memories, stories, and objects all carry the past into the present. As we think about these messages from the past, we might wonder, too, about what...

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

I have a beautiful collection of knives but none are mine. These are deposits belonging to those who forgot them on my back.

I run my finger along the crease of the envelope, feel the weight of history inside. Wherever I'm going next, these are coming with me.

And then this happened. And then this other thing happened. Oh, and I almost forgot to tell you about the time this happened. I should've had this book over for a cup of coffee and a chat.

Aryami Bose's home had been closed up for years, inhabited only by books and paintings, but the spectre of thousands of memories imprisoned between its walls still permeated the house.

When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if...

I plucked this sprig of heath; Autumn is dead, remember - don't forget We will no longer see each other on Earth Smell of time, sprig of heath And remember that I am waiting for you

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us... on the inside, looking out.

I never knew what sad work the reading of old - letters was before that evening, though I could hardly tell why. The letters were as happy as letters could be - at least those early letters were....

Too bad there wasn't a Valencia filter to smooth out memories.

This larder of memories, of sex, of life, of family that we had built up, could always be called upon in the leaner times of our relationship... Everything we had built together over twenty years was...

All great autobiography is about loss, about the hopeless but necessary quest to retrieve and control a past that forever slips away. Memory is both inspiration and burden, method and subject, the...

We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss.

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.

The hundred lovers sleep forever beneath the dry earth. Andalusia has long red roads. Córdoba, green olive trees where to place a hundred crosses, that they remember them.

He remembers what I forget and I remember what he forgets. It's too late for either of us to make another old friend.

… the air is a library and a phonograph record of all lived life, of every spoken phrase, and in it, all words ever spoken still resonate.

Once upon a time wasn't as long ago as it used to be.