#memory

The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#retrospect #life

The BFMSS [British False Memory Syndrome Society] The founder of the 'false memory' movement in Britain is an accused father. Two of his adult daughters say that Roger Scotford sexually abused them in childhood. He denied this and responded by launching a spectacular counter-attack, which enjoyed apparently unlimited and uncritical air time in the mass media and provoke Establishment institutions that had made no public utterance about abuse to pronounce on the accused adults' repudiation of it. p171-172 The 'British False Memory Syndrome Society' lent a scientific aura to the allegations - the alchemy of 'falsehood' and 'memory' stirred with disease and science. The new name pathologised the accusers and drew attention away from the accused. Buy the so-called syndrome attacked not only the source of the stories but also the alliances between the survivors' movement and practitioners in the health, welfare, and the criminal justice system. The allies were represented no longer as credulous dupes but as malevolent agents who imported a miasma of the 'false memories' into the imaginations of distressed victims. Roger Scotford was a former naval officer turned successful property developer living in a Georgian house overlooking an uninterrupted valley in luscious middle England. He was a rich man and was able to give up everything to devote himself to the crusade. He says his family life was normal and that he had been a 'Dr Spock father'. But his first wife disagrees and his second wife, although believing him innocent, describes his children's childhood as very difficult. His daughters say they had a significantly unhappy childhood. In the autumn of 1991, his middle daughter invited him to her home to confront him with the story of her childhood. She was supported by a friend and he was invited to listen and then leave. She told him that he had abused her throughout her youth. Scotford, however, said that the daughter went to a homeopath for treatment for thrush/candida and then blamed the condition on him. He also said his daughter, who was in her twenties, had been upset during a recent trip to France to buy a property. He said he booked them into a hotel where they would share a room. This was not odd, he insisted, 'to me it was quite natural'. He told journalists and scholars the same story, in the same way, reciting the details of her allegations, drawing attention to her body and the details of what she said he had done to her. Some seemed to find the detail persuasive. Several found it spooky. p172-173 ↗

— Beatrix Campbell

#bfmss #child-abuse #child-rape #child-sex-abuse #enable-abuse

There are things in our blood that are just naturally passed down to us, whether we want to recognize them or not. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#ancestral-memory #bloodlines #dna #familial-perspectives #family

When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#family

I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room ↗

— Audrey Niffenegger

#happiness #loss #love #memory #mother

Do you remember what we just did? Please tell me you remember what we just did." She briefly toyed with the idea of lying and saying no, just to see the look on his face, but she'd had enough of having her brain played with – it wouldn't be too sporting to do the same to him. "Yes, I remember, and don't you think for one minute that just because you had me on my back screaming I was 'yours'," she waved four fingers in quotation marks in front of his face, "that it gives you any kind of ownership over me, because it doesn't." He looked annoyed, then relieved, then he laughed. "Yeah, whatever, baby. ↗

— Dianna Hardy

#humour #making-love #memory #ownership #pueblo-and-amy

آه كم هي عنيدة الذاكرة وذاكرتي لا تتركني بسلام ، تملأ مخيلتي بصور ، بكلمات ، بألم وحب ↗

— Isabel Allende

#memory #novel #love

I fly through memory to find a newborn love. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#find #finding-love-love #flying #literature #literature-quotes

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#nostalgia #recollection #love

Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shift of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#heartache #hurt #love #memory #pain