Memories Back Then Quotes & Sayings

I'm not sure," she said. "There's no one answer to that. You have to
find your own way. Sometimes I try to erase myself. I imagine a big
pink soft soap eraser, and it's going back and forth, back and forth,
and it starts down at my toes, back and forth, back and forth, and
there they go-poof!-my toes are gone. And then my feet. And then my
ankles. But that's the easy part. The hard part is erasing my senses-my
eyes, my ears, my nose, my tongue. And last to go is my brain. My
thoughts, memories, all the voices inside my head. That's the hardest,
erasing my thoughts." She chuckled faintly. "My pumpkin. And then, if
I've done a good job, I'm erased. I'm gone. I'm nothing. And then the
world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl. — Jerry Spinelli

I really appreciated having the tape-and that song-back again. Even then, it was mainly a nostalgia thing, and today, if I happen to get the tape out and look at it, it brings back memories of that afternoon in Norfolk every bit as much as it does our Hailsham days. — Kazuo Ishiguro

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future. — Yukio Mishima

It doesn't matter if I get my memories back or not," Simon said. "It doesn't matter if another demon gives me amnesia tomorrow. I know you: You'll come find me again, you'll come rescue me no matter what happens. You'll come for me, and I'll discover you all over again. I love you. I love you without the memories. I love you right now."
Isabelle said in a calm voice: "I know."
Simon stared at her. "Was that ... ," he said slowly. "Was that a Star Wars reference? Because if it was, I would like to declare my love all over again."
"Go on, then," said Isabelle. "I mean it. Say it again. I've been waiting awhile."
"I love you," said Simon. — Cassandra Clare

Stop a minute, Ambrose!" interrupted Master Nathaniel. "I've got a sudden silly whim that we should take an oath I must have read when I was a youngster in some old book ... the words have suddenly come back to me. They go like this: We (and then we say our own names), Nathaniel Chanticleer and Ambrose Honeysuckle, swear by the Living and the Dead, by the Past and the Future, by Memories and Hopes, that if a Vision comes begging at our door we will take it in and warm it at our hearth, and that we will not be wiser than the foolish nor more cunning than the simple, and that we will remember that he who rides the Wind needs must go where his Steed carries him. — Hope Mirrlees

I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, I want to say. But they won't. — Margaret Atwood

I have to remember it... or Genma-sama'll come to hate me...and then he'll abandon me... What can I do, to become the "Himi" that you want...? What do I have to do to bring back my memories? There's nothing. In my heart, there's nothing... — Yuki Shimizu

Quote from "A la bulgaro":
"So long time has passed since those days, and since that story, which is still vivid in my memory, and even more vivid than all the rest. Some times I stay alone in my work - room here, in my father's old mansion in Pasadena, and I look through the old, yellow pages again and again. Then I go back to the north part which is furnished in my style, with many colored Bulgarian carpets and blankets (special kind of Bulgarian blankets with long fur), I make my coffee in a cooper coffee - pot, which has been brought from there, and my thoughts wonder to those absurd memories of mine ...
Very often some friends ask me - what is that unusual memories of yours? I can't explain to them, better say I don't want to, and I always avoid the answer by saying - a la Bulgaro - in a Bulgarian way ... "Oh, yes, yes" ... — Alexandar Tomov

There isn't an hour of my life without you in it. I mend the boats, test them and all the while the memories come in like the tide.
I was thinking today of when we were young, and you left our world for a bigger world. I was a lot more scarred then I would admit. I fought my fear by telling myself you'd come back someday, and trying to think of the first thing I'd say to you when I saw you again. I must have tried out a hundred possibilities. What did I finally say? Not much, my mouth wouldn't work except to kiss you, and when you said I'm here to stay that said it all. Well, I'm doing it again. I keep imagining what I'd say to you if somehow you came back. — Nicholas Sparks

Dreams are the eraser dust I blow off my page.
They fade into the emptiness, another dark gray day.
Dreams are only memories of the plans I had back then.
Dreams are eraser dust and now I use a pen. — Edgar Allan Poe

In the tell-me-again times, ( ... ) when my mom and I lived in a little apartment in a little building downtown, I slept in her bed. It was a raft on the ocean, a cloud, a forest, a spaceship, a cocoon that we shared. I could stretch out like a five-pointed star and then she'd bundle me back up in her arms. I'd wake in the morning tangled in her hair. — Erica Lorraine Scheidt

With that Nox turned a knob. There was a delay, but that was how the machine worked. First it gathered information about the subject, feeling, sensing - like a fighter in a ring, circling his opponent.
Kaleb sensed it, too. It was as if a doctor palpated his flesh, pushing his skin. It tingled gently. The tingling surged through his whole body. Was this it? Kaleb thought. Visions from his past shot through his brain. His mother. Father. Zenobia. Joan and Reck. The Three Musketeers. Pleasant memories.
Then the machine found what it searched for, and it acted. Waves of pain shot through his entire body, causing him to arch his back. He screamed in agony, his screams reverberating across the canyon. Then all of his muscles constricted. He couldn't breathe, couldn't even scream. It seemed to last forever. It stopped, and his muscles relaxed, allowing him to breath. — Cate Campbell Beatty

Then one day I guess my mind decided I was ready, because that was the day I remembered everything and then I stopped answering the questions altogether. I think maybe my brain made a mistake about how strong I was, but it didn't let me send the memories back. — Katja Millay

That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically. — Joseph Roth

Writing therapy is my form of healing. Try and detach yourself from painful memories by infusing characters and then stepping back. — Phil Wohl

Then I turned to him commanding That he go the way he came, whence he came. But he answered me in sorrow, "May the Past not seek to borrow From the Present without blame - Just one memory from its store, Ere it goes to come no more, Back the pathway that it came, whence it came?" — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

When Sam's having a hard time and being a total baby about the whole thing, I feel so much frustration and rage and self-doubt and worry that it's like a mini-breakdown. I feel like my mind becomes a lake full of ugly fish and big clumps of algae and coral, of feelings and unhappy memories and rehearsals for future difficulties and failures. I paddle around in it like some crazy old dog, and then I remember that there's a float in the middle of the lake and I can swim out to it and lie down in the sun. That float is about being loved, by my friends and by God and even sort of by me. And so I lie there and get warm and dry off, and I guess I get bored or else it is human nature because after a while I jump back into the lake, into all that crap. I guess the solution is just to keep trying to get back to the float. This morning Sam woke at 4:00, so — Anne Lamott

I bought singles until I started working properly and then I started buying albums, so this brings back a lot of teenage memories from being in London before I got work — Billy Ocean

Well then, music take me on that wonderful journey of my lost memories, and never take me back to reality. — Seth Hawkins

My earliest memories were on the cattle stations up in the Outback. And then we moved back to Melbourne and then back out there and then back again. Probably my most vivid memories were up there in Bulman with crocodiles and buffalo. — Chris Hemsworth

Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere. — Carla H. Krueger

Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

You try to tap into a memory and you close your eyes and it comes back. So I was doing this in the painting and then that became a practice of mine. Sometimes it was a cathartic situation, a way to meditate. — Jose Parla

If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope some of it might open our eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do. — Anthony Esolen

I've loved her for centuries," he said. "And I will love her until the stars burn out."
"Well, okay then," I said, leaning into him. "That's all you had to say."
He stilled when he realized for certain that I knew. That I had all my memories back. The relief I felt from him melted me. His emotions were overwhelming. — Darynda Jones

-If I somehow possessed a set of videotapes that contained all the most significant events of your childhood, in their entirety, would you want to see them?
-Absolutely. Right this very second.
-But why? Don't you think some of the tapes would be very sad?
-Most of them, yes. But if I could see them, then I could have them in my brain like regular memories-horrible memories, yes, but regular memories, not sinister little ghosts in my head that pop out of some part of me I don't even know, and take the rest of me away. Do you know what I mean?
-I think so, If you have to remeber, you'd rather do it in the front of your brain than in the back. — Martha Stout

Everyone will have gone then except us, because we're tied to this soil by a roomful of trunks where the household goods and clothing of grandparents are kept, and the canopies that my parenrs' horses used when they came to Macondo, fleeing from the war. We've been sown into this soil by the memory of the remote dead whose bones can no longer be found twenty fathoms under the earth. The trunks have been in the room ever since the last days of the war; and they'll be there this afternoon when we come back from the burial, if that final wind hasn't passed, the one that will sweep away Macondo, its bedrooms full of lizards and its silent people devastated by memories. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

And then I went back to face the future memories that had been flapping around in my mind like wounded birds. — Cyn Balog

That's how memory works ... Things disappear without your permission, then come back again without your permission. — Kristin Cashore

But that's how memory works," Bitterblue said quietly. "Things disappear without your permission, then come back again without your permission." And sometimes they came back incomplete and warped. — Kristin Cashore

Can I be honest with you?" he asked.
"Aren't you always? And brutally so?"
"I never realized you were a woman."
She choked on a laugh of surprise. "Excuse me?"
"Inside my head ... " he pointed, just in case she didn't know what a head looked like. "Inside my memories? You were always a little girl, like Izzy. Just a girl, skipping around, getting into trouble, and mouthing off. I never noticed you'd turned into a woman."
Though the comprehension of the way he viewed her stung like the burn on her hand, she gave his broad chest beneath that worn-out gray Marines T-shirt an understanding pat with her unburned hand. "I know. It happens to the best of us female types."
His big hand came up and captured hers against his chest.
"Annie?"
"yeah?"
His gaze slowly traveled over her face, down to her lips, then back to her eyes. "I'm noticing now. — Candis Terry

I used to love hospitals. That's another weird thing about me. I remember when my grandmother
so sweet, God rest her soul
was in the hospital, I always loved visiting her there. Very morbid memory! Most people hate hospitals. And I'm not a big fan of them now, but there was something about it for me back then. — Jennifer Aniston

It was about the preciousness of that, and how they viewed those birds as art, as something valuable. I didn't care one way or another back then, but now, thinking about my grandparents - who are still alive but getting older - I see the birds as sort of time capsules. Now I go home during the holidays and they hold a lot of weight in terms of nostalgia and memory. Now they mean everything. — Nick Cave

Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), to the astute decision that he should write in the manner of Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov. Fifty percent Odoevsky and fifty percent Lazhecknikov. This went over well, in part because readers, their memories mostly faulty, had forgotten poor Odoevsky (1803-1869) and poor Lazhechnikov (1792-1869), who died the same year, and in part because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing. — Roberto Bolano

Maligant items don't have to be reminders of bad times, like a breakup or a health crisis. They can bring back memories of loved ones or high points in your life. But if these memories leave you feeling sad or feeling that your life isn't as good now, then the objects are causing you mental and emotional harm and have no place in your home. ...The key to enjoying happiness and good health in a warm, welcoming home is to live IN THE PRESENT MOMENT surrounded by items that you cherish and that have meaning for you and your family. If too much of your time is spent replaying your greatest hits or struggling with old pain, you're not making new memories of your present life. --pg 20 — Peter Walsh

I release ribbons of gratitude to flow back upon the path I have walked as it stretches out behind me, so they brush past everyone whose path crossed my own. May they feel the brief kiss of remembrance within their hearts, there and then gone again, passing like a spring breeze, so that they suddenly know the things they have done for others, in so many ways big and small, seen and unseen alike, somewhere are known and treasured. — Cristen Rodgers

[Think] of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else could you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Every bit of you has been replaced many times over (which is why you eat, of course). You are not even the same shape as you were then. The point is that you are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, while simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that does not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important. — Steve Grand

I roll over on my back and clutch the book against my chest; then I chuck it on the carpet. It's too heavy to rest on me, too full of history. Not all of it is bad. Some of the memories make me smile. Some of them make me mad. But more dangerously, some of them make me wonder what my life would be like as a girlfriend, what it would be like to have a regular relationship, with all its ups and downs and awkward moments.
I switch out my lamp and stare at the ceiling in the dark, taking a series of shaky breaths. I know that it's better this way, being the one in control. The one in control calls the shots, and the one in control sets the pace.
Most important of all, the one in control doesn't get hurt. — Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

We are amazingly similar to the children of Israel. We spend half our lives looking back at our own Egypt with selective memories, longing to have our comfort zone back. Then we spend the other half wishing our days away for a dreamy future in our own promised land. — Lysa TerKeurst

Awareness came back slowly, and not very pleasantly. First were all the aches and twinges, then the dizziness, and last the sensation of movement. Before I even opened my eyes I realized that once again I was on a horse, clasped upright by an arm.
The Marquis again? Memories came flooding back--the dungeon, the Baron's horrible promise, then the knife and Shevraeth's comment about timing. The Marquis had saved me, with about the closest timing in history, from a thoroughly nasty fate. Relief was my foremost emotion, then gratitude, and then a residual embarrassment that I didn't understand and instantly dismissed. He had saved my life, and I owed him my thanks.
I opened my eyes, squinting against bright sunlight, and turned my head, words forming only to vanish when I looked up into an unfamiliar face. I closed my eyes again, completely confused. Had I dreamed it all, then? Except--where was I, and with whom? — Sherwood Smith

Don't we all have a certain number of images that stay around in our head, which we undoubtedly call memories and improperly so, and which we can never get rid of because they return in our sky with the regularity of a comet - torn away also from a world about which we know almost nothing? They return more frequently than comets do, in fact. It would be better, then, to speak of them as loyal satellites, a bit capricious and therefore even troublesome: they appear, disappear, suddenly come back to badger our memory at night when we cannot sleep. But, little as we may care to, as our hearts tell us to, we can also observe them at will, coldly, scrutinize their shadows, colors, and relief. Only, they are dead stars: from them we shall never grasp anything other than the certainty that we have already seen them, examined them, questioned them without really understanding the laws that the line of their mysterious orbits obeyed. — Marc Auge

I want you to go back to your memories and count the times you failed and then, count the times you broke through those barriers to win again. — Kenya Wright

A memory from my youth comes back to me. You go into the woods on a bike, with a girl. There is the smell of heather, you can hear the wind in the fir trees, you don't dare tell her about your love, but you feel happy, as if you were floating above the ground. Then you look at the clouds beyond the trees and they are fleeting. And you know that within an hour you'll have to go home, that tomorrow will be a working day. You wish you could stop that moment forever, but you can't, it is bound to end. So you take a photo, as if to challenge time. — Robert Doisneau

This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products — Larry McCaffrey

In seven years, thought Laurie, every cell in one's body has been replaced, even our memories live in a new brain. That is not the face I saw, and these are not the eyes I saw with. Even our selves are not the same, but only a consequence of the selves we had then. Yet I was there and I am here; and this man, who is sometimes what I remember and sometimes a stranger I met at a party the other day, is also to himself the I who was there: his mind in its different skull has travelled back to a place his living feet never visited; and the pain he felt then he can feel again. — Mary Renault

But it wasn't their separation that was consuming my mind just then; it was Evelyn's garden. Bee had taken us there when we were children, and it was all rushing back: a magical world of hydrangeas, roses, and dahlias, and lemon shortbread cookies on Evelyn's patio. It seemed like only yesterday that my sister and I sat on the little bench under the trellis while Bee hovered over her easel, capturing on her canvas whatever flower was in bloom in the lush beds. "Your garden," I said, "I remember your garden."
"Yes," Evelyn said, smiling.
I nodded, a little astonished that this memory, buried so deep in my mind, had risen to the surface just then like a lost file from my subconscious. It was as if the island had unlocked it somehow. — Sarah Jio

It seems to me that being psycho-analysed is essentially a process where one is forced back into infantilism and then rescued from it by crystallising what one learns into a sort of intellectual primitivism-one is forced back into myth, and folk lore and everything that belongs to the savage or undeveloped stages of society. For if I say to you: I recognise in that dream,such and such a myth; or in that emotion about my father, that folk-tale; or the atmosphere of that memory is the same as an English ballad-then you smile, you are satisfied. As far as you are concerned, I've gone beyond the childish, I've transmuted it and saved it, by embodying it in myth. But in fact all I do, or you do, is to fish among the childish memories. of an individual, and merge them with the art or ideas that belong to the childhood of a people. — Doris Lessing

In a person's lifetime there may be not more than half a dozen occasions that he can look back to in the certain knowledge that right then, at that moment, there was room for nothing but happiness in his heart. — Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

I was back on track, raring to go and then the insomnia kicked in. When you don't sleep, your faculties are not as sharp as they would normally be. My memory has been affected, I'm not as mentally agile as I would be if I were sleeping properly. I can't work because to act you need to be able to learn your lines and I can't do that at the moment. Insomnia is awful. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. — Emily Lloyd

When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great is an attribute of youth and the process of aging is the process of that expectations' gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments. — Victor Hugo

You will have memories
Because of what we did back then
When we were new at this,
Yes, we did many things, then - all
Beautiful ... — Sappho

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this simple localization of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of pyschoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives. — Gaston Bachelard

My favorite memories were never about candy or anything like that. When I got to be a teenager, my friends and I used to get together and do all kinds of crazy stuff on Halloween night. We had a ball starting trouble. Now that I'm more mature I realize that wasn't the right way to act, but it was the time of my life back then. — Tony Harrison

Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me
a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we lost and may never have cared for. — Andre Aciman

Little is the imagination of the person who believes that the future of another may be determined by his/her past. We are so much more than our minds and our memories! We are in fact transcendent souls. If you determine what is ahead by what you can see when you look back, then you will in fact never behold what actually stands in front of you. — C. JoyBell C.

He reached out and laid a hand against Quick Ben's brow, then grunted. 'He's on his way back. It's protective sorcery that's keeping him asleep.' 'Can you speed things up?' 'Sure.' The healer slapped the wizard. 'Quick Ben's eyes snapped open. — Steven Erikson

Still, when I read the story, I felt like I'd written half of it myself, and the author guy was responsible for the other half. And when the two halves came together it was like the end of amnesia and all the memories came flooding back. The best stories are like that. They're like spaceships. they take you somewhere far away and you think, oh, what a weird place. But then you think, wait, maybe I've been here before. Maybe I was even born here. — Victor Lodato

[M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people. — Elizabeth F. Loftus

And if anger and fear could persist - then also, of course, stronger emotions could as well, such as love. Was that what drew some people back to reincarnate within their own families? Was that what caused some children to remember their past connections? And if so, then perhaps this phenomenon, these children's memories he had studied so carefully, was not against the laws of nature, after all. Perhaps it was the foundational law of nature that they were proving, what he'd been documenting and analyzing for over thirty years without knowing it: the force of love. He shook his head. His brain was going soft, maybe. Or maybe not. He'd kept so many of these questions at bay all these years, and now they whirled around him, touching him with something like awe, on their way to someplace else. — Sharon Guskin

You know how sometimes you just have a memory of looking up and seeing a face looking over your crib and then remember nothing until tenth grade? - I have one of these early memories where I'm in the back of my parents' car, a place I loved to spend a lot of time as an only child, not having to fight with venomous siblings over the only toy. — Billy Collins

Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control. — Cyril Connolly

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

One of my great memories of John is from when we were having some argument. I was disagreeing and we were calling each other names. We let it settle for a second and then he lowered his glasses and he said: "It's only me." And then he put his glasses back on again. To me, that was John. Those were the moments when I actually saw him without the facade, the armor, which I loved as well, like anyone else. It was a beautiful suit of armor. But it was wonderful when he let the visor down and you'd just see the John Lennon that he was frightened to reveal to the world. — Paul McCartney

Fear? Back then, I didn't even realize what that new feeling was. Later, when it overwhelmed me and almost pulled me under, I understood. And, since then, a nameless fear has hung like a plume of smoke over the great, colourful desert of this country, above my sometimes blissful, sometimes terrible memories of it. — Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Ignifex's eyes widened a fraction. "He's a coward and a fool," he repeated distantly, as if he had learnt the words by rote. Then his gaze snapped back to me. "Why shouldn't I know my own shadow?"
"He got better than you at kissing somehow," I said. "Don't you ever wonder how?"
If Shade was really the prince-and I still thought he was-then perhaps he could stir up some of Ignifex's memories.
Maybe I wanted him to be jealous, too.
Ignifex opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off. "You can meditate on that for a while. I need to go look for ways to defeat you. — Rosamund Hodge

All I can off you are painful memories and my broken soul, but I love you, and if you'll allow it, I promise to always love you. If that's enough for you, then, yes, I'm back. — Lisa Desrochers

Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it urged them harder and deeper into each other's weakest points, showing them cunning ways around each other's strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and strike again. In the space of a gasp for breath it sent their memories racing back over the years for old weapons to rip the scabs off old wounds; it went on and on. — Richard Yates

Don't you want to take a last look at the place?" he asked Hedwig, who was still sulking with her head under her wing. "We'll never be here again. Don't you want to remember all the good times? I mean, look at this doormat. What memories . . . Dudley puked on it after I saved him from the dementors . . . Turns out he was grateful after all, can you believe it? . . . And last summer, Dumbledore walked through that front door . . . ."
Harry lost the thread of his thoughts for a moment and Hedwig did nothing to help him retrieve it, but continued to sit with her head under her wing. Harry turned his back on the front door.
"And under here, Hedwig" - Harry pulled open a door under the stairs - "is where I used to sleep! You never knew me then - Blimey, it's small, I'd forgotten . . . . — J.K. Rowling

In the light of consciousness all sorts of things happen and one need not give special importance to any. The sight of a flower is as marvelous as the vision of God. Let them be. Why remember them and then make memory into a problem? Be bland about them; do not divide them into high and low, inner and outer, lasting and transient. Go beyond, go back to the source, go to the self that is the same whatever happens. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

It could be yesterday
when I was less in love
I think
For I didn't see you in the mirror
behind me
while getting dressed.
The way your hands couldn't stay away
and our bodies always found their ways back to each other
as if they were meant to be together
Close.

But then it was today and I saw you
again
in the mirror
behind me while getting dressed

So I go to sleep tonight
alone
without actually falling asleep because I'm scared of the moment I will wake up
and realise it was just a dream
You're actually gone.

Now all I can do is get through to another tomorrow
hoping that I will be less in love
again
Like yesterday

But not today.
I was never really well with things at all. — Charlotte Eriksson

The whiff of ocean on the southern breeze and the smell of burning asphalt brought back memories of summers past. It had seemed as though those sweet dreams of summer would last forever: the warmth of a girl's skin, an old rock 'n' roll song, freshly washed button-down shirt, the odor of cigarette smoke in a pool changing room, a fleeting premonition. Then one summer (when had it been?) the dreams had vanished, never to return. — Haruki Murakami

As he mused on the possibilities he became aware of the odor of cigarette smoke. And the sound of muted sobs ... As she tried to stifle her anguish, what came out of her was utterly mournful, the saddest thing Luke had ever heard. He wanted to scramble out of the tree house, climb back into his room, and shut the window. But he was afraid to move. She would hear him.
So he just sat there, hearing the agony of thousands of failed days bleed out of Nell. He put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes. he didn't want to hear her sobbing, didn't want to acknowledge she felt pain - nor that he knew she'd lived through more pain than anyone else he'd ever known. That maybe she had sent Norah and Kieran away because she knew Eleanor's home had to be happier than hers. He didn't want to acknowledge that. He wouldn't be able to hate her then. — Susan Meissner

William's head tilted and the fluorescent lights above us reflected in his eyes, making them glow like translucent sapphires. "I wasn't sure I had anything here in Providence drawing me back." He studied my face and then smiled that schoolboy grin from all my memories. "But I don't think Providence has seen the last of me yet. — Robin M. King

For people who have something in the present it is easier to forget the past, although you never wholly do so. When winter comes, spring is a vague memory, something looked back at with nostalgia, but winter is the here and now and requires all your energies. If spring were to vanish and there were nothing, an abyss, if that were even possible to imagine, then you would live with memories of spring for ever and ever or else become a part of the abyss itself. The same can sometimes be said for love, but not always. There are some loves that live on for years, inexplicably, although the lovers are parted and there is no hope that they may ever reunite except as polite and distant friends. — Rona Jaffe

He finally pulled it all back into his heart, sucking in the painful tide of his misery. In the Glade, Chuck had become a symbol for him - a beacon that somehow they could make everything right again in the world. Sleep in beds. Get kissed goodnight. Have bacon and eggs for breakfast, go to a real school. Be happy.
But now Chuck was gone. And his limp body, to which Thomas still clung, seemed a cold talisman - that not only would those dreams of a hopeful future never come to pass, but that life had never been that way in the first place. That even in escape, dreary days lay ahead. A life of sorrow.
His returning memories were sketchy at best. But not much good floated in the muck.
Thomas reeled in the pain, locked it somewhere deep inside him. He did it for Teresa. For Newt and Minho. Whatever darkness awaited them, they'd be together, and that was all that mattered right then. — James Dashner

Somehow I cannot let it go yet, funeral though it is,
Let it remain back there on its nail suspended,
With pink, blue, yellow, all blanch'd, and the white now gray
and ashy,
One wither'd rose put years ago for thee, dear friend;
But I do not forget thee. Hast thou then faded?
Is the odor exhaled? Are the colors, vitalities, dead?
No, while memories subtly play - the past vivid as ever;
For but last night I woke, and in that spectral ring saw thee,
Thy smile, eyes, face, calm, silent, loving as ever:
So let the wreath hang still awhile within my eye-reach,
It is not yet dead to me, nor even pallid. — Walt Whitman

My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important. — Mary E. Pearson

Familiar like a forgotten song from long ago that takes you back to a moment the second you hear it. And you recognize who you were. Then. And now. And you have to figure out how to reconcile the two. — Katy Regnery

I have very fond memories of growing up in Greece, of my brothers and I causing chaos and climbing up trees, which is really cool. Back then, we didn't have all the video games and all that stuff. We just had each other, and we played on the street. — Tracy Spiridakos

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. — Julian Barnes

If you hear a good idea, capture it; write it down. Don't trust your memory. Then on a cold wintry evening, go back through your journal, the ideas that changed your life, the ideas that saved your marriage, the ideas that bailed you out of bankruptcy, the ideas that helped you become successful, the ideas that made you millions. What a good review-going back over the collection of ideas that you gathered over the years. So be a collector of good ideas for your business, for your relationships, for your future. — Jim Rohn

There are terrible, terrible memories of September 11th, things that I saw, people that I lost, the devastation, the identification of bodies. I mean, all these memories come back to you at different times. And then the other side of it this tremendous response with the firefighters and the police officers saving people, the rescue workers. — Rudy Giuliani

Early the next morning, I drove him to the airport, kissed him good-bye, told him I wasn't wearing any panties, and then kissed him once more while he tried to push me back into the car to see if I was bluffing. I was not. Kissing him a final time, I told him I loved him and I'd see him in two weeks. No one ever tells you to remember these moments. To photograph them in your mind, develop them into memories, to have them easily accessible and on instant recall when you'd need them later. To try and replay and re-create the last time you see someone. — Alice Clayton

Memory implies that there is some static time and place you can go back to, whereas if you relive it by trying to put yourself back in that context, its more nuanced, less black and white. More traumatic, but also more exciting. When I knew I had to write about things that would be painful, I put off doing it for ages. But then eventually the fear of not doing it becomes greater than the fear of doing it. — Damian Barr

She would (if she could) put her arm around the girl she'd been and try to tell her Take it easy, but the girl would not have listened. The girl had no receptors for Take it easy. And besides, "Hey Jude" was on the radio, it was her prayer, her manifesto, almost her dwelling place. She sang it everywhere. The music made her cry then; it makes her cry now. Listening to it now brings back memories so sharp they taste like blood in her mouth. — Abigail Thomas

Only just now she said to me, 'I am very happy, papa!' When they say 'father' stiffly, it sends a chill through me; but when they call me 'papa,' it brings all the old memories back. I feel most their father then; I even believe that they belong to me, and to no one else. — Honore De Balzac

But you smiled at me and said consolingly, "People come back again."
"Yes" I said, "they come back, but then they have forgotten".
There must have been something odd, something passionate in the way I said that to you. For you rose to your feet as well and looked at me, affectionately and very surprised. You took me by the shoulders. "What's good is not forgotten; I will not forget you," you said, and as you did so you gazed intently at me as if to memorise my image. — Stefan Zweig

A city finds its life through the humans who inhabit it. When they go, what is truly left? Just silent stones, witnesses to the history but mute in its telling, remaining thus while slowly turning to rubble. It saddens me that life's moments are thus lost, that one cannot experience the past in the same rich vibrancy as the present. You live the moments and then relegate them to memory, now just two-dimensional shadows, pictures without depth, stripped of their purest emotion, their tactile connections no longer accessible. You try to recall, but can bring back only a fraction of the event lived. The rest is gone, never to be as full and complete as it was in that one place at that one time. That was what I thought as I studied these stone remains; that all the tangible things experienced here abide somewhere in time, but can never again be wholly re-animated, now just ghosts imbedded in the crumbling walls and in the fading memories of those who once lived here. — Michael Puttonen

Your memories are like the air I breathe. I don't have to keep checking on it every now and then to make sure whether I am doing it or not. It happens all by itself. But the moment I try to stop it and hold it back forcefully, I start craving for it more and before I could even know I will be fighting to get more of it so that I could survive. — Akshay Vasu

I'm not known as a singer, but in life I like to do things that are a bit beyond my reach to keep myself from slipping. I find that technology has made it so that we don't need to have a memory system, and as I get older I want to do things that challenge me. What could be more challenging than doing this show with a knee that's been replaced, after tearing my Achilles heel with a baker's cyst on the back of my knee? And then I have to try and dance! — George Hamilton

A mosaic of memories takes me back to my own childhood, and then to my children. My earliest memory of St. Augustine was a day trip from Jacksonville; a day with some neighbors who were nice enough to purchase me a plastic toy-tugboat with a blue superstructure and white hull. Other accounts meld into my adult years. With its history and attractions, The Ancient City is pristine and picturesque by most accounts; but from the Newer Jail (not the Old Jail) , the perspective is very different. — H. Kirk Rainer

History, she realized, was mostly lost. No matter how diligent the recorders, the witnesses, the researchers, most of the past simply no longer existed. Would never be known. The notion seemed to empty her out somewhere deep inside, as if the very knowledge of loss somehow released a torrent of extinction within her own memories-moments swirling away, never to be retrieved. She set a finger in one groove etched into the stone, followed its serpentine track downward as far as she could reach, then back up again. The first to do so in how long? — Steven Erikson

And where was that day? Past and dead. Whose humiliating memories were these? His and not his father's. What had he to think back on that he could call good? Very, very little. You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then, general forgiveness. — Saul Bellow

There are some things that don't change much. I find the smell of a dish, or the way a certain spice is crushed, or just a quick look at the way something has been put on a plate, can pull me back to another place and time. I love those memories that seem so far away, yet you can hold them and carry them with you, even forget them, and then, with a single taste or hint or a smell, be chaperoned back to a beautiful moment. — Tessa Kiros

Very soon she'll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. They can be recognized. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter. The way they walk and talk and scream or try to kill (themselves or you) if you laugh back at them. Yes, they've got to be watched. For the time comes when they try to kill, then disappear. But others are waiting to take their places, it's a long, long line. She's one of them. I too can wait - for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie ... — Jean Rhys

His knees locked and he pushed his weight against Mr. Jones's hand. It wasn't the dim light coming through the skylights or the giant steel fan that waited to chop them up or the smell of urine or the dank-dungeon cells that lined both sides of the aisle that made Danny step back. It was a sense of panic, of fear, that saturated the atmosphere like an electrical current, tingling in his bowels. The boys ahead of him didn't seize up, but they stutter-stepped. Like the end of a ship's plank was dead ahead. Danny felt this type of fear spreading through his groin like cold fingers once before. A memory emerged in the soupy sea of memories inside his head. He remembered getting pulled out of the back seat of a car with his hands cuffed behind his back by someone. But then like everything he tried to remember, there were gaps. — Tony Bertauski

The fire roared down upon us. It curled through our hair, then wrapped around our wrists and faces, trying to drag us apart. It seared across my skin, hotter than the Heart of Fire, and yet more painful was how it seared through my mind. The fire burned away my memories, taking back his name and mine, both of my pasts and all of my hopes, the sky and the sparrow and the world itself. I clung to somebody I did not know, could not imagine knowing, but I still knew beyond all doubt that he was mine.
We fell until we had been falling forever and always, and always would continue falling, because nothing existed outside this chaos of fire and shadow.
But I held on to him.
And he held on to me. — Rosamund Hodge

If for some reason she never regained her memories, she still didn't want to lose this male. Even the thought of that happening sent a shot of agony ricocheting through her.
Larissa tore her lips back fromAiden's "I might never regain my memories," she blurted, needing to let him know.
"Then we'll make new ones. — Katie Reus