The Body Remembers Quotes & Sayings

The mind remembers only certain things. The body remembers everything. The information it carries goes back to the beginning of existence. — Jaggi Vasudev

For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all. — Dorothy Allison

My body remembers: this is what it is to be filled by love, instead of despair. — Jodi Picoult

It's the forties look," she says to George, hand on her hip, doing a pirouette. "Rosie the Riveter. From the war. Remember her?"
George, whose name is not really George, does not remember. He spent the forties rooting through garbage bag heaps and begging, and doing other things unsuitable for a child. He has a dim memory of some film star posed on a calendar tattering on a latrine wall. Maybe this is the one Prue means. He remembers for an instant his intense resentment of the bright, ignorant smile, the well-fed body. A couple of buddies had helped him take her apart with the rusty blade from a kitchen knife they'd found somewhere in the rubble. He does not consider telling any of this to Prue. — Margaret Atwood

A bruise is how the body remembers it's been wronged. — Jodi Picoult

I don't think that when you love somebody, it ever
really goes away,' Earth said, looking out the window.
'It's like riding a bike. You can decide you don't like bike
riding any more, and do soccer for a while, but then when
you get back on a bike, it's like your body remembers how
to do it without you even having to think about it.' She
looked up at me. 'I think love is like that. — Jocelyn Davies

There is so much in this store I can picture Magnus wanting," Simon said, picking up a glass bottle of body glitter suspended in some kind of oil.
"Is it against some kind of rule to buy presents for someone who broke up with your friend?"
"I guess it depends.
Is Magnus your closer friend, or Alec?"
"Alec remembers my name," said Simon, and he set the bottle back down. — Cassandra Clare

The ground shakes and she remembers the stories of dusty boys who lost their legs trying to jump the train to the other side. Legs made of dirt. Returned to dirt. But what a wonderful sound that had. "The other side." Worth losing one's legs for, losing one's entire body to reach there. The other side. — Ray Else

It is not simply what one remembers, but why. There are sites of amputation where the past is severed from the body of the present. Remembering only encourages the growth of phantom limbs. And it is not simply what one remembers, or why, but what to do with what one remembers, which of the scattered pieces to carry forward, what to protect and preserve, what to leave behind. — Camilla Gibb

I do not need to understand words to know he is disappointed I am not a boy. Some things need no translation. And I know, because my body remembers without benefit of words, that men who do not welcome girl-babies will not treasure me as I grow to woman - though he call me princess just because the Guru told him to.

I have come so far, I have borne so much pain and emptiness!

But men have not yet changed. — Shauna Singh Baldwin

what does separation look like
a wall
a wave
a body of water
a ripple of light
or a shimmer of subatomic particles parting
what does it feel like to push through
her fingers press against the rag surface of her dream
recognizing the tenacity of filaments
and know that it is paper
about to tear
but for the fibrous memory
that still lingers there
supple
vascular
and standing tall.
the tree was past
and the paper is present
and yet,
paper still remembers holding itself upright and altogether
like a dream
it remembers its sap — Ruth Ozeki

As we walked, I began to wonder what the opposite of molting was and why, unlike the body, which sheds everything, the soul cannot let go but compiles and accumulates, growing annual rings around the things it wants and dreams and remembers — Andre Aciman

I hate my body Hate what it remembers. Hate what it let him do. — Cheryl Rainfield

There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body's sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers forever. — Alexandre Dumas

No pain ever takes full leave of its person. That pain is greedy and doesn't give ground. That a body remembers what hurts it and how. Old pains get swallowed by new pains. But newer pains always follow suit. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through feeling. He does it through texture. It is all physically driven, that language. — Twyla Tharp

Then he's inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget. — Jayne Anne Phillips

It's up to you. Everyone should get to choose their own way, and that's all I mean by yelling. But I shall choose to remember you, and it would be nice if it went both ways. That's how it generally goes in my country. But does it? September thought. If a body is hurt, they try to forget the person who hurt them and never think about the pain again. Remembering aches, like when I remember my father. It'd be so much easier to never wonder about him. I'm sure he remembers my face, but it's hard to remember his, when he's been gone so long! Perhaps memory is a thing that everyone involved has to work at, like stitching up a big quilt out of everything that ever happened to you. — Catherynne M Valente

Remember, you can lead a fifty-seven-year-old body to motherhood, but you can't make it stay awake. — Erma Bombeck

The body remembers what your mind forgets. — Martha Manning

When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as burdensome are actually the things that make us more human. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Oh, young Stibbons reckons he's caught Uncertainty,' said the Senior Wrangler, licking the paper. 'As soon as his body remembers what it's called it forgets where it's supposed to be. — Terry Pratchett

A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul. — Barbara Kingsolver

Cash misses his wife with a blank pain in his chest, and he misses his sisters and cousins, who have known him since he was a strong, good-looking boy. Everyone back there remembers, or if they are too young, they've been told. The old ones get to hang on the sweet, perfect past. Cash was the best at climbing trees; his sister Letty won the story bees. The woman who married Letty's husband's brother, a beauty named Sugar, was spotted one time drinking a root beer and had her picture in LIFE magazine. They all know. Now she has thin hair and a humped back but she's still Sugar, she gets to walk around Heaven, Oklahoma, with everybody thinking she's pretty and special. which she is. That's the trouble with moving away from family, he realizes. You lose your youth entirely, you have only the small tired baggage that is carried within the body. — Barbara Kingsolver

When she's gone far and long enough that she no longer remembers her name, she stops, and presses her fingers deep into her sockets, scooping her eyes out and pinching off the long ropes of flesh that follow them out of her body like sticky yarn. What rushes from her mouth might be screaming or might be her soul, and it is smothered in the indifferent silence of the wild world. — Livia Llewellyn

The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Brandon is just the kind of man whom every body speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers to talk to. — Jane Austen

I am becoming the woman I've wanted,
grey at the temples,
soft body, delighted,
cracked up by life
with a laugh that's known bitter
but, past it, got better,
knows she's a survivor--
that whatever comes,
she can outlast it.
I am becoming a deep
weathered basket.

I am becoming the woman I've longed for,
the motherly lover
with arms strong and tender,
the growing up daughter
who blushes surprises.
I am becoming full moons
and sunrises.

I find her becoming,
this woman I've wanted,
who knows she'll encompass,
who knows she's sufficient,
knows where she's going
and travels with passion.
Who remembers she's precious,
but knows she's not scarce--
who knows she is plenty,
plenty to share. — Jayne Brown

I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently ... but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur. — Michael Ondaatje

Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels' recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psyche's ghostly script? — Glen Duncan

The symptomatology of PTSD.
In PTSD a traumatic event is not remembered and relegated to one's past in the same way as other life events. Trauma continues to intrude with visual, auditory, and/or other somatic reality on the lives of its victims. Again and again they relieve the life-threatening experiences they suffered, reacting in mind and body as though such events were still occurring. PTSD is a complex psychobiological condition. — Babette Rothschild

Don't talk to me like that," she squeaked. "Like what, baby? Talk like a man who appreciates what he sees? A man who remembers how it felt to kiss your full lips? To touch your body? I might have been drunk that night, but I've had years to remember. Years of lonely nights dreaming of your ivory skin against mine. The scent of you. The taste ... — Eve Langlais

The body remembers who we are supposed to be. And in this there is grief. — Susan Griffin

We were once enwombed in the earth and the silence of the body remembers that dark, inner longing. Fashioned from clay, we carry the memory of the earth. Ancient, forgotten things stir within our hearts, memories from the time before the mind was born. Within us are depths that keep watch. These are depths that no words can trawl or light unriddle. — John O'Donohue