Small Memory Quotes & Sayings

Calm now," I said with my lips to his ear and my hand to the side of his face. I knew he was thinking of Bad Axe, straining against a distant memory. In a lucid instant, he gripped my hand and searched my face. I felt him fighting to hold to this life, at great sufferance to himself.
I whispered, "Don't struggle for me, Henry, not if you are tired and wish to go."
I pressed my lips to his cheek, touched my finger to the corners of his eyes to brush away the moisture there.
"Husband?" I asked, searching his face, wondering why, suddenly, it had changed so.
All that night, I kept watch over him.
Even though he had gone, I did not want him to believe that such a small thing as the end of living could ever separate the two of us. — Micaela Gilchrist

One really ought to be afraid of self-torture. But it tempted me. It begged. The dark place that my mind was fast becoming blends, in my memory, with the dark womb of church: the chant, the fugue of prayer, the strange erotic energy that carving a very small cross into my thigh with a nail had brought. — Marya Hornbacher

The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

After he left the planet with his brothers, he'd imagined he'd live out his life alone.
That was until he met Annabelle.
His memory lingered back to the day he stepped into her bakery. His brothers were still unpacking when he decided to take a walk into town. The first time he saw her, she was placing muffins into a customer's bag. Even with her messy hair bun and stained pink apron, she was pure perfection. His entire body warmed when he got a backside peek at her pink tank top and itty bitty jean shorts. Before he knew what was happening, he'd gone inside and sat down in the same booth he sat in now. And when she came to the table to take his order, she'd bit down on her bottom lip. He'd known then those lips would complicate his life, but he had no idea just how much. — Stacey O'Neale

I am trying now to re-create in my mind the picture of the man as I saw him in 1939- he, the revered author of Sinister Barriers, I the novice. I think I can rely on my near-photographic memory for the purpose. (I call it "near-photographic" because I can only remember things that happen to be lying around near photographs.)

Let's see, as I recall, he is six-feet seven-inches tall (when he is sitting down, that is) with a long and majestic English face. Then, too, I distinctly remember, there was a small flashing golden aura about his head, the occasional play of hissing flashes when he moved it suddenly, and the distant rumble of thunder when he spoke. — Isaac Asimov

When I did "Top of the Pops" for the first time, Ace of Base was one of the other bands, and I have a memory of them on a small stage next to me in the TV studio. A memory of their performance is burned into my mind. Seared. — Beck

It struck her how sad it was that all of them had grown up on top of one another like small animals in a too-small cage, and now would simply scatter. And that would be the end of that. Everything that had happened would be sucked away into memory and vapour, as though it hadn't even happened at all. — Lauren Oliver

At this point, there flashed briefly through Stenton's horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G. Wells's "The Star." He had first read it as a small boy, and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy. — Arthur C. Clarke

Times like this were special. Memory builders. When something extraordinary happened to a person the
kind of things remembered forever after it didn't have to be a life-changing event like a graduation or
marriage or birth of a child. It more often was the small things. The sheer joy of summer sunlight on a
fragrant flower. The giggle of a toddler. The brush of a lover's fingertips. And the person marks the
moment with the flashing insight thinking ... This is special. I should remember this — Sandra Hill

Knowing that conscious decisions and personal memory are much too small a place to live, every human being streams at night into the loving nowhere, or during the day, in some absorbing work. — Rumi

You have a memory chip that small implanted in you, he verified.
I nodded, guessing this was somewhat worse than having cooties. — James Patterson

This is the most precious gift anyone has ever received. You gave me back a memory that I will cherish forever. You gave me something from my grandma I didn't know I had. And you kept it and it lef you back to mme. It gave me you'
I felt a wetness in my eyes and I blinked confused from the strange sensation. A small trickle of water rand down my cheek. I stared into the darkness as I held Pagan in my arms in amazement Death had just shed a tear. — Abbi Glines

Standing there small among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative. — Alexandra Kleeman

Deep spirit scanning," Eisfanger says. His voice has a strange resonance to it, like I'm hearing him through a bad phone connection. "Don't worry, it's completely safe. Well, mostly."
"Mostly?"
"Side effects have been documented," he admits. "In a very small percentage of cases. Less than two percent."
"What kind of side effects?" Suddenly I'm feeling nauseous. Feels like the ants are crawling around inside me now, which is exactly as disturbing as it sounds.
"Memory loss. Synesthesia. And occasionally ... vestigial growths."
"So I could forget my own name, start smelling purple everywhere and have an extra nipple sprout from my forehead? — D.D. Barant

Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things. — Neil Gaiman

Asking where memory is "located" in the brain is like asking where running is located in the body. There are certainly parts of the body that are more important (the legs) or less important (the little fingers) in performing the task of running but, in the end, it is an activity that requires complex coordination among a great many body parts and muscle groups. To extend the analogy, looking for differences between memory systems is like looking for differences between running and walking. There certainly are many differences, but the main difference is that running requires more coordination among the different body parts and can be disrupted by small things (such as a corn on the toe) that may not interfere with walking at all. Are we to conclude, then, that running is located in the corn on your toe? — Ian Neath

With his fingers, he followed the shape of her chin, her jaw, and learned her features, committing them to memory. Her face was small, her bones fragile. Exquisite. — Sofia Grey

Blackouts can be fun if approached with the right mindset. You just can't sweat the fact that you've lost a small portion of your life for all eternity. Occasionally, little bubbles of memory will float up like surreal Mylar party balloons at unexpected times throughout the net day and start piecing together a colorful, if incomplete, version of reality. — Josh Kilmer-Purcell

And when those children died, our memory would fade, and when their children died, it would be swept away like the dust we become, down and away to the long tunnels. It would have been a small life, but I would have liked it. — Pierce Brown

My students tag tables, walls, and chairs because their greatest fear is that no one will ever remember them. They do not believe they can give impassioned speeches, rally people in protest, paint masterpieces. They think they will die, small and forgotten, and it dictates their every action. — Thomm Quackenbush

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

Who was she in high school? Little Miss Nobody. She could have embroidered it on her sweaters, tattooed it across her forehead. And in small letters: i am shit, i am anonymous, step on me. please. She wasn't voted Most Humorous in her high school yearbook or Best Dancer or Most Likely to Succeed, and she wasn't in the band or Spanish Club and when her ten year reunion rolled around nobody would recognize her or have a single memory to share. — T.C. Boyle

Because writers remember everything, Paul. Especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels, not amnesia. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is that ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory. Who — Stephen King

There is in this valley a beating heart. It is always and ever there. And when I am gone, it will beat for you and when you are gone, it will beat for your children and theirs, forever. Forever. Until there is no water, no air, no green in the spring or gold in the autumn, no stars in the sky or wind from the north. And when you cannot speak, it will speak for you. When you cannot see, it will be your eyes. When you cannot remember, it will be your memory. It will never forget you. And when you cannot be faithful, it will save a place for your return. This is a gift to you. It cannot be taken away. It is yours forever. It is the narrative of this world, and the scrapbook of your own small life, and, when you are gone into ash and darkness and the grave, it will tell your story. — Robert Goolrick

We are but a tattered remnant, a small and bastard race who linger on the shoulders of that giant race, a memory that is always our better. We look backward always, scratching in the ruins, reclaiming scraps from their vast and long-abandoned table of knowledge. For we are misshapen offspring, stunted in our ways and our minds, reaching blindly after the treasures of knowledge lost to time. — Ned Hayes

It makes sense that your response to a bad break-up line would be to set someone on fire," I responded. "Fire is magical to us because it embodies the passage of time. We can never grasp time because it is invisible, unreachable and continually slipping from our grasp. Do we live in the present? How can we? The present is infinitesimally small. It can't contain human action. We teeter on the brink between our assumed future...where we will be in moments to come...and our memory of the past...where we think we just were. The present doesn't exist in a comprehensible way. Similarly, fire is something we can neither grasp nor touch, yet it has a clear effect...the decay and collapse of life, the acceleration of entropy. Thus when we stand mesmerized by fire, we are actually mesmerized by our own mortality. — David David Katzman

My earliest memory is dreamlike: in a small orchard or garden I am carried on the arm, I believe, of my father; there was a group of grown-ups, my mother among them, and the group was slowly walking in the orchard, it seems toward the house. — Immanuel Velikovsky

The early personal computers were not very powerful so the idea of feeding their program into a small amount of memory requires immense skill. — Bill Gates

We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow. — Patti Smith

Since I was a small boy, I had watched that forest for enemies or for game, and I knew its every mood and shading, how the sunlight fell through the leaves and where the shadows gathered. It held no mysteries for me but much of memory. I had played there as a child with Yance, Jubal, and Brian, later with Noelle. We had climbed its trees, picked berries there, and played hide-and-seek under its branches. — Louis L'Amour

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

The whole human earth was bleeding.
Time, buildings, routes, rain,
erase the constellation of the crime,
the fact is, this small planet
has been covered a thousand times by blood,
war or vengeance, ambush or battle,
people fell, they were devoured,
and later oblivion wiped clean
each square meter: sometimes
a vague, dishonest monument,
other times a clause in bronze,
and still later, conversations, births,
townships, and then oblivion.
What arts we have for extermination
and what science to obliterate memory!
What was bloody is covered with flowers.
Once more, young men, ready yourselves
for another chance to kill, to die again,
and to scatter flowers over the blood. — Pablo Neruda

I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer. I am none of these; I'm a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual. — Primo Levi

The text moves like a small crustacean with compound eye and complex nervous system; throbbing, involuted, it becomes a parasite on a different body, animal, using 'filiform protrusions through which it sucks the vital juices of its host.' Parasite or creature in mutation on the shore, torrid / delirium: mordant mortality, systematic competition the narrator against the I, leaking gas, a lapse of memory against a promise, an inset in a book. A muscular, involuntary bulging in the breast, circling all its inner surface: mesoblast: visceral. — Nicole Brossard

I began to watch places with an interest so exact it might have been memory. There was that street corner, with the small newsagent which sold copies of the Irish Independent and honeycomb toffee in summer. I could imagine myself there, a child of nine, buying peppermints and walking back down by the canal, the lock brown and splintered as ever, and boys diving from it.
It became a powerful impulse, a slow intense reconstruction of a childhood which had never happened. A fragrance or a trick of light was enough. Or a house I entered which I wanted not just to appreciate but to remember, and then I would begin. — Eavan Boland

If there is anything certain in life, it is this. Time doesn't always heal. Not really. I know they say it does, but that is not true. What time does is to trick you into believing that you have healed, that the hurt of a great loss has lessened. But a single word, a note of a song, a fragrance, a knife point of dawn light across an empty room, any one of these things will take you back to that one moment you have never truly forgotten. These small things are the agents of memory. They are the sharp needle points piercing the living fabric of your life.

Life, my children, isn't linear where the heart is concerned. It is filled with invisible threads that reach out from your past and into your future. These threads connect every second we have lived and breathed. As your own lives move forward and as the decades pass, the more of these threads are cast. Your task is to weave them into a tapestry, one that tells the story of the time we shared. — Stephen Lee

But you cannot preserve the memory of applause; it is too volatile, too perishable. Later it would astonish me that I could not satisfactorily summon back that moment[...]No, I would remember the towel...Bo Maybank's towel. Precisely and completely and for the rest of my life. I do not know how he got to know me, but I felt his light leaps up to my face and felt the towel warm against my brow. And his face, I would remember his face as he wiped the sweat from mine, transfigured with joy for me - his face vulnerable and febrile and anonymous - as he danced on the floor below me, as he tried to reach me, as he tried to be a part of the finest moment of my life. — Pat Conroy

You reach a point where the only thing that can shock you is to come truly alive again. To meet someone who kicks the aliveness into action in you, triggering deep, buried, intense responses in you that you have forgotten. You long to be suddenly breathless, pulsing with life like a wild flower that had come abloom, natural and nothing held in check, swaying to the breeze in abandon and finding resonance in the other. In a world of the walking dead, where your own aliveness is but a dull and dying distant memory, the probability of that shock is very low. And, so you relax in lives led, content in everyday mundane, growing weary of spirit, stifling that small voice within that longs for that shock. — Srividya Srinivasan

This is how the time moves - an hour here, a day somewhere, and then it's night and then it's morning. A clock ticking on a shelf. A small child running to school, a father coming home.
Time moves over us and past us, and the feeling of lips pressed against lips fades into memory. A picture yellows at its edges. A phone rings in an empty room. — Jacqueline Woodson

This is my first real memory of James. In every memory before that, he's just a flash of color, a warm body with a blurred face, a comforting voice begging me not to die. When he planted himself between our father and me that day, an eight-year-old with small fists clenched at his sides, I think I fell in love with my brother. — Kate Avelynn

Rumours crop in the short summer nights. Dawn finds them like mushrooms
in the damp grass. Members of Thomas Cromwell's household have been seeking a midwife in the small hours of the morning. He is hiding a woman at some country house of his, a foreign woman who has given him a daughter.
Whatever you do, he says to Rafe, don't defend my honour. I have women like that all over the place.
They will believe it, Rafe says. The word in the city is that Thomas Cromwell has a prodigious ...
Memory, he says. I have a very large ledger. A huge filing system, in which are recorded (under their name, and also under their offence) the details of people who have cut across me. — Hilary Mantel

I don't wish for the red house back, not really, yet in a way, I wish for everything back that ever was, everything that once seemed like forever and yet has vanished ... Standing here on an empty hilltop in New Hampshire, as a bulldozer slowly pushes the debris of a small red house into a neat pile, I allow, just for a moment, the past to push hard against the walls of my heart. Being alive, it seems, means learning to bear the weight of the passing of all things. It means finding a way to lightly hold all the places we've loved and left anyway, all the moments and days and years that have already been lived and lost to memory, even as we live on in the here and now, knowing full well that this moment, too, is already gone. It means, always, allowing for the hard truth of endings. It means, too, keeping faith in beginnings. — Katrina Kenison

Begin with "I remember." Write lots of small memories. If you fall into one large memory, write that. Just keep going. Don't be concerned if the memory happened five seconds ago or five years ago. — Natalie Goldberg

Lament
For J
Among the small graves a soft shaft of sunlight gently rains
On a memory; etches, as a glittering finger,
Golden corn field hair, ignites eyes sweet as the seas blue plains,
Traces lips pink as Marys carnation tears and lingers
Then is gone. Oh ancient sun above how shall I tell
Of the hearts deep yearnings that the years can never quell? — Alan James Roll

It was just regular growing up, of course, the kind everyone does - but it still hurt him, I know, like the memory I have of the time he dropped me off at the train station when I was going back to Chicago. I could see him through the window of the train, but he couldn't see me through the tinted glass.
I waved, trying to get his attention as he walked up and down the platform trying to figure out where I was sitting. From up in the train, he looked so small. If he'd seen me, he would have smiled and waved, but he didn't know I could see him, and the sadness on his face was exposed to me then. He looked lost. He stood there on the platform a long time, even after my train started pulling away, still trying to catch a glimpse of me waving back. — Catherine Chung

Watching Joel sip his iced tea and listen to stories of my childhood, the ones my mom told at all of the family gatherings, I felt my heart warm. He'd been there too. And as she spoke in scattered memory he was probably filling in the small details that had been lost and forgotten in time by everyone else. — Shawn Kirsten Maravel

Sony is a clear leader in the digital camera and camcorder categories. As Sony continues to develop next-generation video and still image capture technologies, the demand for high speed, large capacity, small form factor memory cards will grow as well. — Bill Vaughan

Putting my hands on.
What April couldn't fix
Wasn't worth the time:
Egg shell & dried placenta
Light as memory.
Patches of fur, feathers,
& bits of skin. A nest
Of small deaths among anemone.
A canopy edged over, shadowplaying
The struggle underneath
As if it never happened — Yusef Komunyakaa

The habit of generalizing from one particular, that mainstay of the cheap and obvious essayist, has rooted many fictions in the public eye. Nothing, for example can blot from my memory the profound, searching, and exhaustive analysis of a great nation which I learned in my small geography when I was a child, namely, 'The French are a gay and polite people fond of dancing and light wines. — Kate Douglas Wiggin

The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt ... The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the memory loses power. Over time you become someone else. — Rebecca Solnit

Then she would be that hostess in Houston and I would be that tanned one from Florida, a small memory of chlorinated pool water, fruit juice and gin, steak raw in the middle, and hearty rhythms in the draperied twilight of the tomb-cool motel cubicle, riding the grounded flesh of the jet-stream Valkyrie. A harmless pleasure. For harmless plastic people, scruff-proof, who can create the delusion of romance. — John D. MacDonald

The sea was the first thing he had found that was large enough to absorb his sorrow.

...Perdu would drift on his back, his feet pointing toward the beach. There, on the waves, with the water spilling through his outspread fingers, he drew up from the depths of his memory every hour he had spent with Manon. He examined each one until he no longer felt any regret that it was past, then he let it go.

So Jean let the waves rock him, raise him up and pass him on. And slowly, infinitely slowly, he began to trust. Not the sea, far from it; no one should make that mistake! Jean Perdu trusted himself again. He wouldn't go under; he wouldn't drown in his emotions.

And each time he abandoned himself to the sea another small grain of fear trickled out of him. It was his way of praying. — Nina George

loved tagging along when she pushed open the storeroom door and went inside. It was a small room but filled with an overwhelming array of sacks bulging with different kinds of beans, nuts, flour, sugar, rice, and a multitude of spices, emitting a symphony of assorted smells I can still summon into memory at will. Large glass jars squatted on the shelves, stacked to the ceiling, — Jean Naggar

When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine - like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing. — Mary McCarthy

Her mother had smelled of cold and scales, her father of stone dust and dog. She imagined her husband's mother, whom she had never met, had a whiff of rotting apples, though her stationary had stunk of baby powder and rose perfume. Sally was starch, cedar, her dead grandmother sandalwood, her uncle, swiss cheese. People told her she smelled like garlic, like chalk, like nothing at all. Lotto, clean as camphor at his neck and belly, like electrified pennies at the armpit, like chlorine at the groin. She swallowed. Such things, details noticed only on the edges of thought would not return.
'Land,' Mathilde said, 'odd name for a guy like you.'
'Short for Roland,' the boy said.
Where the August sun had been steaming over the river, a green cloud was forming. It was still terrifically hot, but the birds had stopped singing. A feral cat scooted up the road on swift paws. It would rain soon.
'Alright Roland,' Mathilde said, suppressing as sigh, 'sing your song. — Lauren Groff

I had read it some time ago but was so completely immersed that I retained nothing. This has been an intermittent, lifelong enigma. Through early adolescence I sat and read for hours in a small grove of weed trees near the railroad track in Germantown. Like Gumby I would enter a book wholeheartedly and sometimes venture so deeply it was as if I were living within it. I finished many books in such a manner there, closing the covers ecstatically yet having no memory of the content by the time I returned home. This disturbed me but I kept this strange affliction to myself. I look at the covers of such books and their contents remain a mystery that I cannot bring myself to solve. Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember. — Patti Smith

Albion Park on a fierce spring morning. A mad March day of ice and fire. Thomas's feet beat a tattoo on the path. Every hair, every bristle on his chin stands on end. He is a small star-ship of blazing neurons- He is a librarian on his way to work, half-blind with sun and cold and memory. — Maggie Gee

The memory of my father is wrapped up in white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day of work. Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits out of his hat, he drew love from his small body. — Yehuda Amichai

In setting down these recollections of my early years so far removed from their unfolding, I am fooled, as all are, by time itself. My parents, long gone from my world, live again. Memory, which so confounds our waking life with anticipation and regret, may well be our one true earthly consolation when time slips out of joint." Chapter 6, The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue

"Assembled in a small circle, our faces glowed in the flickering light of the campfire, signs of anxious weariness in our tired eyes, but the meal would prove revitalizing. As the fire burnt down and our bellies filled, a calm complacency settled upon us, like a blanket drawn around our shoulders by absent mothers." Chapter 20, The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue — Keith Donohue

He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch. — Graham Greene

The little house is not too small
To shelter friends who come to call.
Though low the roof and small its space
It holds the Lord's abounding grace,
And every simple room may be
Endowed with happy memory.
The little house, severly plain,
A wealth of beauty may contain.
Within it those who dwell may find
High faith which makes for peace of mind,
And that sweet understanding which
Can make the poorest cottage rich.
The little house can hold all things
From which the soul's contentment springs.
'Tis not too small for love to grow,
For all the joys that mortals know,
For mirth and song and that delight
Which make the humblest dwelling bright. — Edgar A. Guest

Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes - like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night
- little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape wil be quite hidden in the end. — C.S. Lewis

Of all created things the source is one, Simple, single as love; remember The cell and seed of life, the sphere That is, of child, white bird, and small blue dragon-fly Green fern, and the gold four-petalled tormentilla The ultimate memory. Each latent cell puts out a future, Unfolds its differing complexity As a tree puts forth leaves, and spins a fate Fern-traced, bird feathered, or fish-scaled. — Kathleen Raine

I press the memory away as if stuffing it into a drawer that is too small for it. "I'm sorry," I say. I don't know if I really mean it or if I'm just saying it so she still thinks I'm on her side. Then I add tentatively, "Why didn't you — Veronica Roth

A word of consolation
may sweetly touch the ear.
Now and then a quiet song
will clear the mind of fear.
A simple act of kindness
can ease a load of care.
Stories told in memory
diminish all despair.
A whispered prayer of comfort
draws angel arms around.
Counting blessings, great and small,
helps gratitude abound.
These acts, all sympathetic,
will kindly play their part.
But seldom do they dry the tears
shed mutely in the heart. — Richelle E. Goodrich

At the hill's foot Frodo found Aragorn, standing still and silent as a tree; but in his hand was a small golden bloom of elanor, and a light was in his eyes. He was wrapped in some fair memory: and as Frodo looked at him he knew that he beheld things as they had been in this same place. For the grim years were removed from the face of Aragorn, and he seemed clothed in white, a young lord fall and fair; and he spoke words in the Elvish tongue to one whom Frodo could not see. Arwen vanimelda, namarie! He said, and then he drew a breath, and returning out of his thought he looked at Frodo and smiled.

'Here is the heart of Elvendom on earth,' he said, 'and here my heart dwells ever, unless there be a light beyond the dark roads that we still must tread, you and I. Come with me!' And taking Frodo's hand in his, he left the hill of Cerin Amroth and came there never again as a living man. — J.R.R. Tolkien

He suspected the Archdeacon of not having read them; he was in painful doubt as to what was really thought of them by the leading minds of Brasenose, and bitterly convinced that his old acquaintance Carp had been the writer of that depreciatory recension which was kept locked in a small drawer of Mr. Casaubon's desk, and also in a dark closet of his verbal memory. These were heavy impressions to struggle against, and brought that melancholy embitterment which is the consequence of all excessive claim: even his religious faith wavered with his wavering trust in his own authorship, and the consolations of the Christian hope in immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten Key to all Mythologies. For — George Eliot

Amidst his chaotic thoughts, Ellis thought of Clairey's face, and he clung to that image. He conjured the radiant glow of her eyes when she was pleased with something, and the small, bashful smile that was fleeting but infinitely more priceless because of its rarity. Clairey's memory was the light that came on the heels of a black and starless night. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever known. It was more than her looks that drew him to this conclusion; it was her kindness, her strength, her spirit. Somehow, the thought of her tethered him to sanity. — Tracy Winegar

Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga. — William Zinsser

In a 'wheat and tares' world, how unusually blessed faithful members are to have the precious and constant gift of the Holy Ghost with reminders of what is right and of the covenants we have made. 'For behold, ... the Holy Ghost ... will show unto you all things what ye should do.' (2 Ne. 32:5.) Whatever the decibels of decadence, these need not overwhelm the still, small voice! Some of the best sermons we will ever hear will be thus prompted from the pulpit of memory - to an audience of one! — Neal A. Maxwell

Another badass Gurkha in recent memory was Sergeant Dipprasad Pun of the Royal Gurkha Rifles. In 2010, while serving as the lone on-duty guard patrolling a small one-room outpost on the edge of the Afghan province of Helmand, Pun was suddenly ambushed by somewhere between fifteen and thirty Taliban warriors armed with RPGs and assault rifles. During his Ultimate Mega Gurkha Freakout Limit Break Mode, the five-foot-seven-inch sergeant fired off four hundred rounds of machine gun ammunition (every bullet he had), chucked seventeen grenades, detonated a remote mine, and then took an enemy soldier down by chucking a twenty-pound machine gun tripod into the dude's face. — Ben Thompson

Inertia is, perhaps, the single most powerful stumbling block to writing. It takes energy, courage, patience, and commitment to keep writing in your journal. It's no small thing to open doors, let down barriers, enter sealed rooms, and walk obscure avenues of memory that haven't been traveled in years - or perhaps ever been traveled. — Frank McCourt

The hippocampus is the structure where memory is supposedly controlled. It is the most plastic part of the brain; it is also the part that is assumed to absorb all the damage from repeated insults like the chronic stress we experience daily from small doses of negative feelings - as opposed to the invigorating "good stress" of the tiger popping up occasionally in your living room. You can rationalize all you want; the hippocampus takes the insult of chronic stress seriously, incurring irreversible atrophy. Contrary to popular belief, these small, seemingly harmless stressors do not strengthen you; they can amputate part of your self. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There are places in life that seep into your soul, becoming forever a part of it. You need encounter such places only once for your life to be unsuspectingly, and perhaps subtly, altered. Profound conversations and transcendental decisions are found in such places, moments forever inhabiting the deepest corners of memory: a bench in a remote park, a dark street corner, a small plaza, a doorstep. They are there, these places, in the soul, to be called up when one's ability to carry on, to persevere, is tested. — Jaume Sanllorente

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis. — Dwight Yoakam

That's truth, Harvey, not what's written on a piece of paper or in blood too small to see - but the memory of how it felt being together. — Simon Van Booy

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

My first operating system project was to build a real-time system called RSX-11M that ran on Digital's PDP-11 16-bit series of minicomputers ... a multitasking operating system that would run in 32 KB of memory with a hierarchical file system, application swapping, real-time scheduling, and a set of development utilities. The operating system and utilities were to run on the entire line of PDP-11 platforms, from the very small systems up through the PDP-11/70 which had memory-mapping hardware and supported up to 4 MB of memory. — Dave Cutler

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

Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition from foraging to agriculture: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." 79 So why did our foraging ancestors leave Eden? For many, it was never an explicit choice: they had multiplied themselves into a Malthusian trap in which the fat of the land could no longer support them, and they had to grow their food themselves. The states emerged only later, and the foragers who lived at their frontiers could either be absorbed into them or hold out in their old way of life. For those who had the choice, Eden may have been just too dangerous. A few cavities, the odd abscess, and a couple of inches in height were a small price to pay for a fivefold better chance of not getting speared — Steven Pinker

AS their peculiar perfume is the chief association with spices, so sorcery is allied in every memory to gypsies. And as it has not escaped many poets that there is something more strangely sweet and mysterious in the scent of cloves than in that of flowers, so the attribute of inherited magic power adds to the romance of these picturesque wanderers. Both the spices and the Romany come from the far East - the fatherland of divination and enchantment. The latter have been traced with tolerable accuracy, If we admit their affinity with the Indian Dom and Domar, back to the p. 2 threshold of history, or well-nigh into prehistoric times, and in all ages they, or their women, have been engaged, as if by elvish instinct, in selling enchant. merits, peddling prophecies and palmistry, and dealing with the devil generally ill a small retail way. As it was of old so it is to-day - Ki shan i Romani - Adoi san' i chov'hani. Wherever gypsies go, There the witches are, we know. — Charles Godfrey Leland

My world was very limited in size and experience. Small things took on extra importance, at least to a child. — Dan Groat

Like most policemen, Landsman sails double-hulled against tragedy, stabilized against heave and storm. It's the shallows he has to worry about, the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque. The memory of that summer, for example, or the thought that he had long since exhausted the patience of a kid who once would have waited a thousand years to spend an hour with him shooting cans off a fence with an air rifle. The sight of the Longhouse breaks some small, as yet unbroken facet of Landman's heart. All of the things they made, during their minute in this corner of the map, dissolved in brambles of salmonberry and oblivion. — Michael Chabon

Quimby was eventually killed by a disgruntled poet during an experiment conducted in the palace grounds to prove the disputed accuracy of the proverb "The pen is mightier than the sword," and in his memory it was amended to include the phrase "only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp. — Terry Pratchett

No matter where you live, you have the memory of something you used to eat that is no longer a part of your diet - something your grandmother used to make, something a small shop used to carry. Something we have lost. This extinction is a process; it happens one meal at a time. — Preeti Simran Sethi

It's a small reminder, but it lingers, and the more I try to ignore the memory, it multiplies into a monster that can no longer be contained. — Tahereh Mafi

Kiernan. I had a sudden memory of the small, scuffed-up shoe I'd seen just before I fell. He must have snatched the bracelet when the crowd gathered around me. If I managed to get out, I resolved to give him every last penny I had and cover his little face with kisses. — Rysa Walker

Yet how often is it that we are rescued by a stranger, if ever at all? And how is it that our lives can become drained of the possibility of forgiveness and kindness - so drained that even one small act of mercy becomes a potent lifelong memory? How do our lives reach these points? — Douglas Coupland

The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciouness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep. Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event. Thus, even normally safe environments may come to feel dangerous, for the survivor can never be assured that she will not encounter some reminder of the trauma. — Judith Lewis Herman

That small freckle postulates a grin on my face:
see to it that midnight reeks insomniac on your eyes;
I turn the pillow upside down to not smell my breath again
Is there, aside from my memory, for you a better place? — Ashfaq Saraf

How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words! — Vladimir Nabokov

Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr C. D. Broad, 'that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.' According — Aldous Huxley

Much of what you see out there is manufactured by your brain, painted in like computer-generated graphics in a movie; only a very small part of the inputs to your occipital lobe comes directly from the external world, the rest comes from internal memory stores and other processes. — Ruby Wax

There was something in the pages of these books that had the power to make him feel better about things, a life raft to cling to before the dark currents of memory washed him downstream again, and on brighter days, he could even see himself going on this way for some time. A small but passable life.
And then, of course, the end of the world happened. — Justin Cronin

The deliberate effort of memory for small detail is a social grace that will take a person far. — Carolyn Haines

The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made their living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being nonexistent persons. — George Orwell

I imagine the feelings of two people meeting after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't, have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect. — Milan Kundera

When she looked at herself in her wedding photographs, Ammu felt the woman that looked back at her was someone else. A foolish jewelled bride. Her silk sunset-coloured sari shot with gold. Rings on every finger. White dots of sandalwood paste over her arched eye-brows. Looking at herself like this, Ammu's soft mouth would twist into a small, bitter smile at the memory - not of the wedding itself so much as the fact that she had permitted herself to be so painstakingly decorated before being led to the gallows. It seemed so absurd. So futile.
Like polishing firewood. — Arundhati Roy

So he steeled himself and sent a wordless, desperate cry for aid up into the sky, hoping it would pierce the roof of the jail and the mantle of clouds and the net of stars behind that, venturing out beyond to where nothingness had no claim and there might be some consciousness, some intelligence that would listen and understand and sympathize. Something, just something. But it seemed unlikely that anything so vast would notice or care.
He was so small. A little man scrambling across the wilderness, trying to make the cosmos pay attention and make sense. In that midnight belly of the jail, dawn was a memory and the sun was no more than a dream, and hope tasted more of a curse to him than a blessing. — Robert Jackson Bennett