One Night Memory Quotes & Sayings

Pedaling down Dune Drive on a red beach cruiser, Dani ahead of her and Vanessa behind her, is a transporting experience. The night is quiet; the air on her face is soft; her hair streams behind her; the stars above are as brilliant as stars in a children's book. They could be nine years old, or fifteen, or twenty-one; they've ridden bikes down Dune Drive at all of those ages and all of the ones in between. There must have been so much more to those summers, but what she remembers are the two weeks she spent in Avalon with Dani and Vanessa - two weeks that always went by too quickly, but that in memory stretch to fill an entire season. — Meg Donohue

Coloured lights splintered behind my eyes. For a few brief, blissful moments, all thought, all memory, dissolved like sugar in water. I was free. There was nothing but sweat and skin, hot harsh breath against my neck, a cock driving into me. Raw, undeserved pleasure stolen from a stranger in a dark room — Alexis Hall

The first time they slept with each other, she lifted her t-shirt and showed him all her scars. She told him about her first memory. She told him about her hazy childhood. She told him about how she stormed out of her house one night after an argument, ran to the sea, and almost threw herself into the waters. And she told him how she couldn't do it; how just the thought of it brought a fear that was so intense it broke her skin and left her with a feeling of reality she had never felt before. — Vatsal Surti

Try it alone now," he said. "I taught you when you were six. You were a fine little rider then. Do you remember?"
"No!" said Azalea.
"You remembered how to ride last winter," said the King quietly. He had his arms crossed. "You rode very well, one night last winter, if I remember."
The horse beneath Azalea shifted, and she clutched to keep her balance.
"That was nearly a year ago," she stammered.
"Some things are burned into one's memory."
The King helped her down gently onto solid ground, and didn't say another word. — Heather Dixon

She closed her eyes briefly, feeling sick. Olivia had experienced strangulation before. Having to look directly into the face of the person who was killing you made the experience beyond awful. But there were worse things than that. Staring into the void of unresolved memory, living an eternal mystery, waking up night after night seeing the face of someone you desperately wanted to save but having not the slightest clue how to do it - all that was worse. If going through with this experience gave her the answers she needed, if it gave her peace, it would be well worth one-hundred-and-thirty seconds of fear and pain. — Leslie Parrish

Listening to her, one experienced a deep uneasiness as of having avoided an urgent responsibility, like someone who, walking at night along the banks of a stream, catches a glimpse in the water of a white face or a moving limb and turns quickly away, refusing to help or to search for help. We all see the faces in the water. We smother our memory of them, even our belief in their reality, and become calm people of the world; or we can neither forget or help them. Sometimes by a trick of circumstances or dream or a hostile neighborhood of light we see our own face. — Janet Frame

One of the Georges - I forget which - once said that a certain number of hours' sleep each night - I cannot recall at the moment how many - made a man something which for the time being has slipped my memory. — P.G. Wodehouse

But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air. — Donna Tartt

No one can really claim to know politics properly until he has stayed up all night writing a speech for delivery the following day. While the world sleeps, the orator paces by lamplight, wondering what madness ever brought him to this occupation in the first place. Arguments are prepared and discarded. The exhausted mind ceases to have any coherent grip upon the purpose of the enterprise, so that often--usually an hour or two after midnight--there comes a point where failing to turn up, feigning illness, and hiding at home seem the only realistic options. And then, somehow, just asa panic and humiliation beckon, the parts cohere, and there it is: a speech. A second-rate orator now retires gratefully to bed. A Cicero stays up and commits it to memory. — Robert Harris

I didn't sleep well last night because one of my ghosts came back, haunting with his presence, and when I woke up, the others weren't here, haunting with their memory. — Donna Lynn Hope

But it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and allowed my mind to relax entirely; then it would let go of the map of the place where I had fallen asleep and, when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was; all I had, in its original simplicity, was the sense of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal; I was more bereft than a caveman; but then the memory - not yet of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been - would come to me like help from on high to pull me out of the void from which I could not have got out on my own; I passed over centuries of civilization in one second, and the image confusedly glimpsed of oil lamps, then of wing-collar shirts, gradually recomposed my self's original features. — Marcel Proust

When I described Madame de T's night, I recalled the well-known equation from one of the first chapters of the textbook of existential mathematics: the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting. From that equation we can deduce various corrollaries, for instance this one: our period is given over to the demon of speed, and that is the reason it so easily forgets its own self. Now I would reverse that statement and say: our period is obsessed by the desire to forget, and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed; it picks up the pace to show us that it no longer wishes to be remembered; that it is tired of itself; sick of itself; that it wants to blow out the tiny trembling flame of memory. — Milan Kundera

Certain miracles that I beheld there have haunted my memory ever since: a gray April morning of sirocco, when the almond blossoms, the flaming tulips, the young green of the vines, hung as if painted on the motionless air; a summer night when the roses had an unearthly pallor under a half-eaten moon, whose ghostliness was somehow one with their perfume and with the phosphorescence of dew tipping their petals; a day when the trees stood part submerged in fog, into which leaves dropped slowly, slowly, one after another, and sank out of sight. — Harrison Gray Otis Dwight

In the middle of the night, she'd woken up with a memory of her grandmother's voice ringing in her ears. "When it happens," the older woman had said, holding on to Jenna's hand with surprising strength for someone with one foot in the grave, "and it will, don't stay in the cities. She can find you in the city. Too many eyes and whispering tongues that no one can see. Run to the woods, far away from everything and everyone you ever knew. Run, girl, run as far and as fast as you can. — Deborah Blake

He knew that the very memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the elements of music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still almost entirely unknown) on which, here and there only, separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void. — Marcel Proust

There is a deep sense in which we are all ghost towns. We are all haunted by the memory of those we love, those with whom we feel we have unfinished business. While they may no longer be with us, a faint aroma of their presence remains, a presence that haunts us until we make our peace with them and let them go. The problem, however, is that we tend to spend a great deal of energy in attempting to avoid the truth. We construct an image of ourselves that seeks to shield us from a confrontation with our ghosts. Hence we often encounter them only late at night, in the corridors of our dreams. — Peter Rollins

They'd fallen into an easy routine, the three of them. Breakfast together in the morning, then Hughie would leave for work and she and Nell would get started in the house. Lil found she liked having a second shadow, enjoyed showing Nell things, explaining how they worked and why. Nell was a big one for asking why-why did the sun hide at night, why didn't the fire flames leap out of the gate, why didn't the river get bored and run the other way?-and Lil loved supplying answers, watching as understanding dawned on Nell's little face. For the first time in her life, Lil felt useful, needed, whole. — Kate Morton

Who am I? What have I done with my life? Who can I trust?
That last one is a doozy. It haunts you in moments of doubt. Sometimes when you wake up at night, you wonder if you've put your faith in the right people. Sometimes when you find yourself alone, for whatever reason, you review every little thing you know about someone, searching your memory for small, subtle things you may have missed about them. — Jim Butcher

Maybe in this nation of the flesh,
Distance will hold us together,

as I try to remember her bent low
to the bleeding heart's small petals,
and around us, buds of wild lilies
where once there was a shallow gorge
that dipped into the clearing and horses
claimed the fields; and that one night
she couldn't sleep, she walked

into the same field to behold
the stars she once named for me.
Maybe now I will understand what secrets
she wanted to share that night
while I pretended to sleep.
Years later, we returned to that place
only to discover that the rains
had flooded the field into a lake,
as if all memory was fiction,
as if memory had turned things around. — Eugene Gloria

Don't make your wedding a pleasant memory in this life but a source of misery in the next. Make it an eternally good memory. In trying to have a halal wedding, you might sacrifice many relationships but the opposite might mean sacrificing the only relationship that will matter in the hereafter for a bunch of people who don't even really care about you. Don't make one night the cause of your regret for an eternity. — Omar Suleiman

free." On the edge of town, Fitzgerald saw a sight "that has never left my memory. It was a picture story of the death of one 82nd Airborne trooper. He had occupied a German foxhole and made it his personal Alamo. In a half circle around the hole lay the bodies of nine German soldiers. The body closest to the hole was only three feet away, a potato masher [grenade] in its fist.II The other distorted forms lay where they had fallen, testimony to the ferocity of the fight. His ammunition bandoliers were still on his shoulders, empty of M-1 clips. Cartridge cases littered the ground. His rifle stock was broken in two. He had fought alone and, like many others that night, he had died alone. "I looked at his dog tags. The name read Martin V. Hersh. I wrote the name down in a small prayer book I carried, hoping someday I would meet someone who knew him. I never did."34 — Stephen E. Ambrose

So things remained until one day, many years later, I happened upon a line in a poem by Heine: "Death is the cooling night." That childhood memory, lost for so long, suddenly restored itself to my quivering heart, returning freshly washed, in limpid clarity, never again to leave me. If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own. Heine put into words the feeling I had as a child when I lay napping in the morgue. And that, I tell myself, is literature. — Yu Hua

I want to see you again," Greystone said quietly.
"I'm not certain that's wise. We are of different worlds, Your Grace. In
yours, I am but one night and in mine you are destined to be merely a
memory. — Lorraine Heath

I turned to Ren, dropping my head low to honor the fallen alpha. The circled wolves did the same. I lifted my muzzle first, my howl singing out the pain of Ren's death, mourning him. One by one my packmates joined the song. Our howls filled the library, spilling into the winter night. The death song grew as the wolves still outside raised their voices to honor the lost young warrior. The chorus of wolf cries, full of heartache, swelled in the night, carrying Ren's memory to the very stars. — Andrea Cremer

He was the only man I killed with my bare hands, but it affected me all right, that one. You never forget it, never. A memory is lodged in the mind but a feeling inhabits the whole body. And I have carried the feeling of that night with me for the last seven decades. — Denis Avey

Still, I'm not convinced that you were right, Dai
that it's such a bad thing, a useless enterprise to reel and reel out my memory at night. Some part of me, the human part of me, is kept alive by this, I think. Like water flushing a wound, to prevent it from closing. I am a lucky one, like Chiyo says. I made a terrible mistake. In Gifu, in my raggedy clothes, I had an unreckonable power. I didn't know it at the time. But when I return to the stairwell now, I can feel them webbing around me: my choices, their infinite variety, spiraling out of my hands, my invisible thread. Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose. It's become my sanctuary here in Nowhere Mill. A threshold where I still exist. — Karen Russell

No one ever forgets a talk they had that lasted through the night. — Marty Rubin

beyond beginnings the earth
her many tribes and clans
their life songs merge into one chant-


- And to each creation the
heartline trail is etched in
delicate memory pattern webs
so intricate
in a unity
of day into night the seasons follow — Peter Blue Cloud

Affraig's eyes moved to the oak tree that towered above her, its branches like antlers against the white sky. Her gaze travelled up to the weathered web that hung from one of the higher boughs, the slender noose swinging inside. In her mind she saw herself weaving it while she chanted words against Malachy's wrathful curse. She remembered the lord's hand settling on her shoulder, the hiss of the fire,
his breath on her neck and, outside, stars falling like fiery rain. Her gaze moved west towards Turnberry.
Her memory clouded with thoughts of the earl, but as she thought of his son her mind cleared. The stars had been falling too on the night he was born. She remembered seeing Mars, full and red, a bloody eye winking in the black. — Robyn Young

Women can go mad with insomnia.
The sleep-deprived roam houses that have lost their familiarity. With tea mugs in hand, we wander rooms, looking on shelves for something we will recognize: a book title, a photograph, the teak-carved bird
a souvenir from what place? A memory almost rises when our eyes rest on a painting's grey sweep of cloud, or the curve of a wooden leg in a corner. Fingertips faintly recall the raised pattern on a chair cushion, but we wonder how these things have come to be here, in this stranger's home.
Lost women drift in places where time has collapsed. We look into our thoughts and hearts for what has been forgotten, for what has gone missing. What did we once care about? Whom did we love? We are emptied. We are remote. Like night lilies, we open in the dark, breathe in the shadowy world. Our soliloquies are heard by no one. — Cathy Ostlere

I used to hate swimming at school so much that I would always sneak downstairs in the middle of the night and take my swimming costume out of my gym bag and hide it in the house somewhere. Then I'd never have to go swimming at school. This went on for months and I never got caught and my Mum turned into a nervous wreck because the thought she was losing her memory ... and then one day she caught me and got super angry. That was kind of bad. — Charli XCX

She didn't remember what airplanes had looked like in flight but she did remember being inside one. The memory was sharper than most of her other memories from the time before, which she thought must mean that this had been very close to the end. She would have been seven or eight years old, and she'd gone to New York City with her mother, though she didn't remember why. She remembered flying back to Toronto at night, her mother drinking a glass of something with ice cubes that clinked and caught the light. She remembered the drink but not her mother's face. She'd pressed her forehead to the window and saw clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. The beauty of it, the loneliness, the thought of all those people living out their lives, each porch light marking another house, another family. — Emily St. John Mandel

There were nights when I got nothing, [but] I still played. With no one to hear me and no one to pay me, and it did not matter.
On those nights, the words were for me alone. They came up unbidden from my heart. They slipped over my tongue and spilled from my mouth. And because of them I, who was nothing and nobody, was a prince of Denmark, a maid of Verona, a queen of Egypt. I was a sour misanthrope, a beetling hypocrite, a conjurer's daughter, a mad and murderous king.
It was dark and it was cold on those nights. The world was harsh and I was hungry. Yet I had such joy from the words. Such joy.
There were times when I lifted my face to the sky, stretched my arms wide to the winter night, and laughed out loud, so happy was I.
The memory of it makes me laugh now, but not from happiness.
Be careful what you show the world.
You never know when the wolf is watching. — Jennifer Donnelly

He wants to tell her that he is not hopeless, that he is not filled with hatred or violence, that he is not a number, a 300 or 600 or any hundred, but just a kid with no one and nothing, and who would do anything to make it otherwise. Just tell me how, he wants to scream. He wants to tell her what it's like to have the same dream night after night, that he's playing tag with his little sister, laughing, happy - then waking up and not knowing if the image in his head is a dim memory, or just something his mind cooked up to fill the black hole. Do you know what it's like to have no past? he wants to ask. And behind it all, like a ringing in his ears, is the question that really nags at him all the time, the one that has haunted him since he was six years old and his family evaporated. He wants to ask it, then and there and for good: What did I do wrong back then? What did I do to deserve this life? — Edward Humes

In the future, Martin will recall this night as the first time -- and one of the only times -- he ever saw Germans crying in public, not at the news of a dead loved one or at the sight of their bombed home, and not in physical pain, but from spontaneous emotion. For this brief time, they were not hiding from one another, wearing their masks of cold and practical detachment. The music stirred the hardened sediment of their memory, chafed against layers of horror and shame, and offered a rare solace in their shared anger, grief and guilt. — Jessica Shattuck

It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory - and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making. — Mark Twain

What do you say to taking up our game where we left off? I was winning, you will recall.'
Winning, for all love: how your ageing memory does betray you, my poor friend,' said Stephen, fetching his 'cello. They tuned, and at no great distance Killick said to his mate, 'There they are, at it again. Squeak, squeak; boom, boom. And when they do start a-playing, it's no better. You can't tell t'other from one. Never nothing a man could sing to, even as drunk as Davy's sow.'
I remember them in the Lively: but it is not as chronic as a wardroom full of gents with German flutes, bellyaching night and day, like we had in Thunderer. No. Live and let live, I say.'
Fuck you, William Grimshaw. — Patrick O'Brian

In the distant reaches of his memory, he found a lesson of Yoda's, from one long solstice night, deep in the jungle near Dagobah's equator. When to the Force you truly give yourself, all you do expresses the truth of who you are, Yoda had said, leaning forward so that the knattik-root campfire painted blue shadows within the deep creases of his ancient face. Then through you the Force will flow, and guide your hand it will, until the greatest good might come of your smallest gesture. — Matthew Woodring Stover

I HAD one clear day of happiness, and I shall never forget it. Even the miserable ending to it cannot change its quality in my memory; for everything that Jennie and I did was good, and unhappiness came only from the outside. Not many - lovers or friends - can say as much. For friends and lovers are quick to wound, quicker than strangers, even; the heart that opens itself to the world, opens itself to sorrow. I don't think that we spoke of the question of where Jennie was to stay that night. She was sailing in the morning (on the Mauretania, I remember she told me - how strange it was to hear the old name again) and we both seemed to take it for granted that we'd stay together until then. We — Robert Nathan

Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage! — Hilary Mantel

But he hadn't appeared that night. Not the next morning, either. By the time she finally crossed paths with him the following afternoon, his mumbled "Merry Christmas" was the extent of their exchange.
It seemed they were back to silence.
I don't want you.
She tried to ignore the words echoing in her memory. They weren't true, she told herself. She was an expert at deceit; she knew a lie when she heard one.
Still. What else to believe, when he avoided her thus?
Although he rarely spoke to her over the next two days, Sophia frequently overheard him speaking of her. Even these remarks were the tersest of commands: "Fetch Miss Turner more water," or "See that her canopy doesn't go slack." She felt herself being tended, not unlike a goat. Fed, watered, sheltered. Perhaps she shouldn't complain. Food, water, and shelter were all welcome things.
But Sophia was not livestock, and she had other, more profound needs. Needs he seemed intent on neglecting, the infuriating man. — Tessa Dare

One of my favorite first sentences of a
book is from Rebecca, Last night I dreamt
I went to Manderley again. — Daphne Du Maurier

On the night of our secret wedding
when he held me in his mouth like a promise
until his tongue grew tired and fell asleep,
I lay awake to keep the memory alive.
In the morning I begged him back to bed.
Running late, he kissed my ankles and left.
I stayed like a secret in his bed for days
until his mother found me.
I showed her my gold ring,
I stood in front of her naked,
waved my hands in her face.
She sank to the floor and cried.
At his funeral, no one knew my name.
I sat behind his aunts,
they sucked on dates soaked in oil.
The last thing he tasted was me. — Warsan Shire

Ah sir," replied Caderousse, "we cannot console those who will not be consoled, and he was one of these; besides, I know not why, but he seemed to dislike seeing me. One night, however, I heard his sobs, and I could not resist my desire to go up to him, but when I reached his door he was no longer weeping but praying.
I cannot now repeat to you, sir, all the eloquent words and imploring language he made use of; it was more than piety, it was more than grief, and I, who am no canter, and hate the Jesuits, said then to myself, 'It is really well, and I am very glad that I have not any children; for if I were a father and felt such excessive grief as the old man does, and did not find in my memory or heart all he is now saying, I should throw myself into the sea at once, for I could not bear it. — Alexandre Dumas

Damn it, it wasn't right. When she lay abed at night, she shouldn't see charging boars and violent tussles. She should dream of the scent of night-blooming jasmine and the texture of organdy and the distant strains of an orchestra playing a stately sarabande. As he had, all those freezing, damp nights.
As he would, in all the bitter years to come.
What had she called him, last night? An insufferable, arrogant cad. Yes, he was.
He wanted Cecily pining for him forever, dreaming she could tame him, yearning for the tender love he could never, ever give.
He wanted her to remember the old Luke, not fantasize about some uncivilized beast.
And if this "werestag" had eclipsed the memory of their kiss with his gory midnight rescue . . .
Luke just would have to do it one better, and give Cecily a new memory to occupy her thoughts. An experience she could never forget. — Tessa Dare

I would like to forget the image of the ship's crane at Southampton docks when it lifted into the sky the three wooden trunks which held all that my family owned. There is only one memory I want to preserve. It is Maria, who is also Zama, sipping condensed milk on the steps of the doep at night. The African nights were warm. The stars were bright. I loved Maria but I'm not sure she loved me back. Politics and poverty had separated her from her own children and she was exhausted by the white children in her care, by everyone and everything in her care. At the end of the day, away from the people who stole her life's energy and made her tired, she had found a place to rest, momentarily, from myths about her character and her purpose in life." (from "Things I Don't Want to Know" by Deborah Levy) — Deborah Levy

In bed that night, in the darkness, with the illuminated dial of her alarm clock glowing from the bedside table, she asked herself whether one could force oneself to like somebody, or whether one could merely create conditions for affection to come into existence and hope that it did, spontaneously. Open then our hearts - these words came into her mind, dredged from somewhere in her memory, from some unknown context. If one opened one's heart, then friendship, and love, too, might alight and make their presence known. It was the act of opening that came first; that was the important thing, the first thing. But who was it who said, Open then our hearts? Where did that come from? — Alexander McCall Smith

And the purple parted before it, snapping back like skin after a slash, and what it let out wasn't blood but light: amazing orange light that filled her heart and mind with a terrible mixture of joy, terror, and sorrow. No wonder she had repressed this memory all these years. It was too much. Far too much. The light seemed to give the fading air of evening a silken texture, and the cry of a bird struck her ear like a pebble made of glass. A cap of breeze filled her nostrils with a hundred exotic perfumes: frangipani, bougainvillea, dusty roses, and oh dear God, night-blooming cereus ... And rising above one horizon came the orange mansion of the moon, bloated and burning cold, while the sun sank below the other, boiling in a crimson house of fire. She thought that mixture of furious light would kill her with its beauty. — Stephen King

When in the wondrous realms above Our Saviour had been called upon, To save our world of sin by love, He said, "Thy will, O Lord, be done.' The Kings of kings left worlds of light, Became the meek and lowly one; In brightest day or darkest night He said, "Thy will, O Lord, be done." No crown of thorns, no cruel cross Could make our great Redeemer shun. He counted his own will but loss, And said, "Thy will, O Lord, be done." We take the bread and cup this day, In memory of the Sinless One, And pray for strength, That we may say, As he, "Thy will, O Lord, be done." — Frank I. Kooyman

Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives - trying to go home again. And also like all men perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone. — Rod Serling

As reason returned to me, memory came with it, and I saw that even on the worst days, when I thought I was utterly and completely miserable, I was nevertheless, and nearly all the time, extremely happy. That gave me something to think about. The discovery was not a pleasant one. It seemed to me that I was losing a great deal. I asked myself, wasn't I sad, hadn't I felt my life breaking up? Yes, that had been true; but each minute, when I stayed without moving in a corner of the room, the cool of the night and the stability of the ground made me breathe and rest on gladness. — Maurice Blanchot

As a boy I slept in a meadow one night. It was summer and the sky was very clear. Before I fell asleep I saw Orion on the horizon, standing above the woods. Then I woke up in the middle of the night - and suddenly Orion was standing high above me. I have never forgotten that. I had learned that the earth is a planet and rotates; but I had learned it as one learns something from books and does not quite realize. But now, for the first time I felt that it really was like that. I felt that the earth was silently flying through the immensities of space. I felt it so strongly that I almost believed I had to hold onto something in order not to be hurled off. Probably it happened because, emerging from a deep sleep and bereft for a moment of memory and habit, I looked into the huge, displaced sky. Suddenly the earth was no longer firm - and since then it has never become wholly firm again - " He — Erich Maria Remarque

Max was fascinated by the woman and more than a little curious about what she might be up to. Sarah Johnson had come from a two-parent, affluent home with a squeaky-clean past. She'd been the golden girl, high school cheerleader, valedictorian and had apparently glided through college without making a ripple, coming out with a bachelor of arts degree in literature. She'd married well, had six children and then one winter night, for some unknown reason, she'd driven her car into the Yellowstone River. Her body was never found. Because there were no skid marks on the highway, it had looked like a suicide. Foul play had never been suspected.
That was twenty-two years ago. Now she was back - with no memory of those years or why she'd apparently tried to take her own life.
Max wanted this story more than he wanted a hot cup of coffee this morning. — B. J. Daniels

The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting. — Walter Benjamin

It was murder - strangulation - but one need not say that the claw-mark on Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory, seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of the word 'LILITH'. One need not mention these things because they vanished so quickly - as for Suydam, one could at least bar others from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The doctor has distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT. The open porthole, just before he turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a certain phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to echo in the night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; — H.P. Lovecraft

All these relics gave ... Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine to memory. I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night's repose on one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought old-English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings, all which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight. — Charlotte Bronte

The hell with your secrets," shouted Bonnie.
"Language, language! How about this: One of you has kept a secret all
their life, and is doing so even now. One of you is a murderer - and I am
not speaking of a vampire, or a mercy killing, or anything like that. And
then there is the question of the true identity of Sage - good luck on your
research there!One of you has already had their memory erased - and I don't mean
Damon or Stefan. And what about the secret, stolen kiss? And then there is
the question of what happened the night of the motel, that it seems that nobody
but Elena can recall. You might ask her sometime about her theories about
Camelot. — L.J.Smith

At night, with only the bedside lamp on, I would pretend to sleep and listened to Dad's muffled crying in the semi-darkness, wishing that I could cry like him, that I could bring Stevan back from the dead by the strength of my tears. But they were regular tears carving the same slicing-hot trails down my cheeks, and in the end, I could not summon a distinct kind of grief for Stevan. Just the same grief that has gripped mankind for centuries, which time would inevitably ebb into a notch in one's skin or a small limp in the way one walks or a bottled memory that would only resurface some nights. And soon, you'd struggle to remember how that person talked or how that person used to occupy a customized space in your life. And you don't want to forget, but you don't want to remember either, and there seemed to be no place where you could just exist. — V.J. Campilan

I have heard that sometimes when a person has an operation to transplant someone else's heart or liver or kidney into his body, his tastes in foods change, or his favorite colors, as if the organ has brought with it some memory of its life before, as if it holds within it a whole past that must find a place within its new host. This is the way I carry Lexy inside me. Since the moment she took up residency within me, she has lent her own color to the way I see and hear and taste, so that by now I can barely distinguish between the world as it seemed before and the way it seems now. I cannot say what air tasted like before I knew her or how the city smelled as I walked its streets at night. I have only one tongue in my head and one pair of eyes, and I stopped being able to trust them a long time ago. — Carolyn Parkhurst

I happen to be one of those people whose memory shuts down under pressure. The answers would come to me in the middle of the night in my sleep! Besides, I am a millionaire. — Terry Pratchett

Look," he tried, "put two men in a rail car, one a soldier, the other a farmer. One talks war, the other wheat; and bore each other to sleep. But let one spell long-distance running, and if the other once ran the mile, why, those men will run all night like boys, sparking a friendship up from memory. So, all men have one business in common: women, and can talk that till sunrise and beyond. Hell. — Ray Bradbury

What a glorious night. Every face I see is a memory. It may not be a perfectly perfect memory. Sometimes we had our ups and downs. But we're all together and you're mine for a night. And I'm going to break precedent and tell you my one-candle wish ... that you would have a life as lucky as mine, where you can wake up one morning and say, 'I don't want anything more'. Sixty-five years. Don't they go by in a blink? — Anthony Hopkins

Rahul had been underwhelmed by the New Year's rituals of the rich. "Moronic," he had concluded. "Just people drinking and dancing and standing around acting stupid, like people here do every night."

"The hotel people get strange when they drink," he told his friends. "Last night at the end of the party, there was one hero-good-looking, stripes on his suit, expensive cloth. He was drunk, full tight, and he started stuffing bread into his pants pockets, jacket pockets. Then he put more rolls straight into his pants! Rolls fell on the floor and he was crawling under the table to get them. This one waiter was saying the guy must have been hungry, earlier- that whiskey brought back the memory. But when I get rich enough to be a guest at a big hotel, I'm not going to act like such a loser. — Katherine Boo

At night it was a different matter. The whole night was his, the night when his cough and his insomnia never failed to start on time, along with the random disconnected images that crossed his mind. No one can stop the machine of memory from working. Nothing has been invented, as far as he knows, that can tame memory, make it work on demand. Even I, with my few exaggerated memories, cannot fend off attacks by the most unpleasant of them. — Amjad Nasser