“I had no eyelashes left. So when I cried, the tears rolled down, unabated to my mouth. My saliva tasted those days, like a salt lake. Or so he said.'(‘Left from Dhakeshwari’)”— Kunal Sen
“The man went to the controls, looking up at me, flaring his nostrils to my actions. His voice was like a voice under water. “We’ll see what becomes of your rebellious nature when you lose your memories, Rei Lin.” He punched a few buttons and turned the knob on the wall to the right.”— Millicent Ashby
“In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.”— Joan Didion
“Gritting my teeth as if it requires actual physical strength, I push the memory of him dying in my arms down, deep down. It almost seems to fight me, to want to surge into the forefront of my mind, and I sigh. Long ago I came to the realization that painful memories are persistent. The agony of them stays with you much longer, sharper, and clearer than sweet memories, that soften and assume a hazy, rosy glow in your mind, almost as if they have been airbrushed. Remembrance of pain is different; there is no muting of colors, no blurring of edges. No, its colors remain stark and bold, a palette of vibrant primary reds, blues, and yellows; its edges stay defined and razor sharp. Years later it can still cut you as deeply, make you bleed as profusely, as the day it was formed. FROM AN UNTITLED WORK IN PROGRRESS”— Lily Velden
“Well, there’s a piece of Maria in every song that I sing. And the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings. And there is always one last light to turn out and one last bell to ring. And the last one out of the circus has to lock up everything.”— Counting Crows
“Music is powerful; it transforms emotions and experiences into something tangible. Every time you hear a familiar song, the feelings from it bubble to the surface, bringing back memories you might have otherwise forgotten.”— Michelle Madow
“The thing is, all memory is fiction. You have to remember that. Of course, there are things that actually, certifiably happened, things you can pinpoint the day, the hour, the minute. When you think about it, though, those things, mostly seem to happen to other people. This story actually happened, and it happened pretty much the way I am going to tell it to you. It’s a true story as much as six decades or telling and remembering can allow it to be true. Time changes things, and you don’t always get everything right. You remember a little thing clear as a bell, the weather, say, or the splash of light on the river’s ripples as the sun was going down into the black pines. things not even connected to anything in particular, while other things, big things even, come completely disconnected and no longer have any shape or sound. The little things seem more real than the big things.”— Robert Goolrick
“Sometimes those experiences crowd back upon the memory, and the past flashes back like a distant peak momentarily lighted up by sunbeam piercing through the clouds. Then oblivion again. Strange it is how the prosaic present may hide the exciting past.”— Whipplesnaith
“Those static images have the uncanny ability to jar the memory and bring places and people back to life. They bridge the present with the past and validate as real what the passage of time has turned into hazy recollections. Were it not for them, my experiences would have remained as just imperfect memories of perfect moments.”— Isabel Lopez
“I’ve learned that some memories surprise you and reveal a sharp edge just when you least expect it.”— Pittacus Lore
“He paused again as a tear of longing rolled from cheek to lip with the sweet-salty taste of an old memory.”— Norton Juster
“When he opens the door, I step in and an army of memories comes at me from all sides.”— Lisa Schroeder
“Toy is talking and this is why I love her. She can go on about herself ceaselessly and like the scratching of a branch against the window at night, the steady insistence of it is comforting. She has stories without beginnings, stories that trail off, stories that crisscross and contradict and dead end.Toy is the star of her stories. Events orbit her like a constellation.”— Erica Lorraine Scheidt
“Discussing it later, many of us felt we suffered a mental dislocation at that moment, which only grew worse through the course of the remaining deaths. The prevailing symptom of this state was an inability to recall any sound. Truck doors slammed silently; Lux’s mouth screamed silently; and the street, the creaking tree limbs, the streetlight clicking different colors, the electric buzz of the pedestrian crossing box – all these usually clamorous voices hushes, or had begun shrieking at a pitch too high for us to hear, though they sent chills up our spines. Sound returned only once Lux had gone. Televisions erupted with canned laughter. Fathers splashed, soaking aching backs.”— Jeffrey Eugenides
“And here in this room, I re-experience the memories again and again it is how wisdom comes and how we shape our future.”— Lois Lowry
“You can order yourself to treasure a moment, to cling tight to a feeling and never let it fade, but it’s your brain, that three-pound lump of hamburger, that makes the final call.”— Isaac Marion
“He got up slowly, not bothering to curse himself for forgetting the stop where he had to disembark. He was not used to leaving things behind; he wondered how the bus stop escaped.”— Faraaz Kazi
“I dug out an old brown suitcase and threw a few clothes into it, then looked around my bedroom for memorabilia, but stopped when I remembered that the purpose of memorabilia is to trigger memory. I didn’t want to be lugging my memories all over the place. They were to heavy.”— Steve Toltz
“There were certain things, learned so young and remembered so deep that they felt like little stones in the center of her mind. These would be the parts of her that rotted last, the bits left over once the rest skittered off on the wind or was drunk deep by the roots.”— Hugh Howey
“The ethics of eating people are blurry at best in the fog of my undead amnesia, but I expect more for such a high price. What I want are the moments I will never have. The warm ones. The living ones.”— Isaac Marion
“I like the memories because they remind meI haven’t always beenthis girl,constantly mad or scaredor confused.”— Lisa Schroeder
“…and realizes how there are all these moments, moments like just this one, there are all these moments, and how everyone lives their lives in these short, all-too-short moments. There are all these moments and what’s so interesting, what makes them beautiful, is the fact that none of them last.”— Joe Meno
“I’ll tell you this much. Men think memories are like murals or statues or truth or whatever happened, never changes none. But that ain’t so. They can capture the untruth of something, just as easy. They can change, especially as time leads to time.(…)To each man himself, his memories seems as solid and factual as a stone mosaic, an urn he could turn around and heft, a flower he could sniff. But when I go inside another, I don’t see it or feel it like that. Everything is shimmery, shifting, like it’s bathed in mist and shadow, like… like walking down the foggiest street you can think of, with everything looking not like itself at all.”— Jeff Salyards
“I am sick of old ghosts and I just want to feel safe again without the haunts of old vulnerabilities.”— Donna Lynn Hope
“He will miss this quiet full of noise: the nighthawks, the way the woods breathe, the things moving unsuspected through the dark. But he will take with him the canisters full of blasted images and have the pleasure of living them again. They are not nothing, the memories.”— Lauren Groff
“In our lives are special moments that live as their own, the rest is movement with the passage of time.”— Donna Lynn Hope
“Night thoughts have a different color than day thoughts, a different slant, more than anything else they know all the secret paths and chinks in the armor they can take advantage of to force their way into consciousness.”— Christa Wolf