#memory

"Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present. In order to reach any kind of success in automobile racing, a driver must never remember."

"The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this."

"She moves through my memory the way the gentle river waves turn the setting sun's rays into a nostalgic light show."

"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 wind may be invisible, but it’s colored by memories of you, as you gently blew into my life, adding motion and emotion to my still-beating heart."

"When she was a child, my love carried a road-map in her hand the way other girls carried handkerchiefs. She always knew the way. Her feet were little wings. And her beautiful head was a compass."

"The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before."

"If you never tell anyone the truth about yourself, eventually you start to forget. The love, the heartbreak, the joy, the despair, the things I did that were good, the things I did that were shameful--if I kept them all inside, my memories of them would start to disappear. And then I would disappear."

"One should cultivate good habits of memory, for it is capable of making existence a Paradise or an Inferno."

"Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?"

"Sweet is the memory of distant friends! Like the mellow rays of the departing sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart."

"We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie."

"One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory."

"Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shift of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it."

"...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure."

"Love doesn't come with an on-off switch. It's made of too many threads of memory and hope and heartache that weave themselves into the very core of who you are."

"It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes."

"Few things are more deceptive than memories."

"Forbidden to remember, terrified to forget; it was a hard line to walk."

"I watered your memory every day to keep it alive, and after all this time it's like a tall cypress tree rooted deep in the St. John's River."