“True stories can’t be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.”— Siri Hustvedt
“And be thinking, remembering. Trying to. All difficult dark stuff, stories stuffed away, like old socks into old pillowcases. Not quite knowing the weight of truth in them much more. And things that I have let be a long time in the interests of happiness, or at least that daily contentment that I was once I do believe mistress of”— Sebastian Barry
“You are speaking…as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing… what you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure.”— C.S. Lewis
“Often, as she leafed through the sticky, plastic-coated pages, spotting herself with a frizzy perm or wearing a loud, printed blouse, she was struck by how long life was, and how much time had passed, and she wished she could go back and apologize to those closest to her, explain that she understood now. Impossible, and yet the urge to return and be a different person never lessened, grew only more acute.”— Stewart O’Nan
“The soft strings of the lute rippled with memories, and the maid’s lilting voice made Mary sigh as she closed her eyes. She fell asleep filled with sadness, but without regret.”— Margaret George
“He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function is to leave just a trace in memory.”— Chris Marker
“I’m thinking about past events. I’m interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.”— Dana Spiotta
“Each of us, I think, adopts a comfortable and familiar era or place in which to plant ourselves; and from then on, that which disagrees with our memories — a new building here, a change in paint there — is forever jarring and anachronistic.”— Daniel D. Victor
“Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious.If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”— James Williams
“Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all.”— Marcel Proust
“It was clear that he didn’t remember me from one day to the next. The note clipped to his sleeve simply informed him that it was not our first meeting, but it could not bring back the memory of the time we had spent together.”— Y?ko Ogawa
“Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant…”— Alan Lightman
“His mind floated in the amniotic fluid of memory, listening for echoes of the past. His father, meanwhile, had no idea that such a vivid scene was burned into Tengo’s brain or that, like a cow in the meadow, Tengo was endlessly regurgitating fragments of the scene to chew on, a cud from which he obtained essential nutrients. Father and son: each was locked in a deep, dark embrace with his secrets.”— Haruki Murakami
“Even after everyone had gone home, the house was filled with the good time they’d had, as if it could linger in the air like the voices and music lingered in memory. Mina wrapped the memory up and put it in her heart; there was a quiet gladness, deep like a tree and tall in her”— Cynthia Voigt
“From key signature to coda, from downbeat to the sound of life’s final fermata, our pasts set the tone for all that was, that is, and that ever would be.”— Jamie A. Hughes
“This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have been difficult for me to understand. It was a very long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama, “Go with the boy.” The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me.”— Marcel Proust
“The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn’t happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.”— Nicole Krauss
“Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.”— Pat Conroy
“There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told and what is true.”— Kevin Powers
“The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.”— Vladimir Nabokov
“Well we have to. We have to remember everything. If we don’t, by the time we grow up it’ll be gone forever.”— Isaac Marion
“Memory did not let go; it remained the net dragged in one’s wake, with all sorts of strange things snarled in the knotted strands.”— Steven Erikson
“Travel does this: it creates space that allows thoughts and memories to intrude and assert themselves with impunity. Smells and sights, the quality of light, the honk of a horn — can all act as touchstones when least expected.”— Andrew McCarthy
“Memory blurs, that’s the point. If memory didn’t blur you wouldn’t have the fool’s courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.”— Joyce Carol Oates