“They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.”
“Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.”
“Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.”
“The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.”
“The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.”
“Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”
“Hindi mo pwedeng mahalin ang isang tao nang hindi mo minamahal ang hilaga, silangan, timog at kanluran ng kanyang paniniwala. Kapag nagmahal ka’y dapat mong tanggapin bawat letra ng kanyang birth certificate. Kasama na doon ang kanyang libag, utot at bad breath. Pero me limit. Pantay-pantay ang ibinibigay na karapatan sa lahat ng tao upang lumigaya, o masaktan, o magpakagago, pero kapag sumara na ang mga pinto, nawasak na ang mga puso, nawala na ang mga kaluluwa at ang bilang ay umabot na sa zero, goodbye na. Pero, the memory of that one great but broken love will still sustain you, tama nga na mas matindi ang mga alaala.”
“...unfortunately, it s true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there s nothing anyone can do about it. If you re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.”
“When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable”
“To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There s much too little forgetting.”
“Grey rocks, and greyer sea, And surf along the shore -- And in my heart a name My lips shall speak no more. ”
“Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.”
“Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.”
“The general root of superstition : namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.”
“It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.”
“The thing with giving up is you never know. You never know whether you could have done the job. And I m sick of not knowing about my life.”
“Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.”