#memory

Nos-tal-gic,’ Akira said, as though it were a word he had been struggling to find. Then he said a word in Japanese, perhaps the Japanese for ‘nostalgic.’ ‘Nos-tal-gic. It is good to be nos-tal-gic. Very important.’ ‘Really, old fellow?’ ‘Important. Very important. Nostalgic. When we nostalgic, we remember. A world better than this world we discover when we grow. We remember and wish good world come back again. So very important. Just now, I had dream. I was boy. Mother, Father, close to me. in our house.’ He fell silent and continued to gaze across the rubble. ‘Akira,’ I said, sensing that the longer this talk went on, the greater was some danger I did not wish fully to articulate. ‘We should move on. We have much to do. ↗

— Kazuo Ishiguro

#happiness #illusions #innocence #loss #lost-innocence

Now, women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. ↗

— Zora Neale Hurston

#hurston #memory #men-and-women #dreams

In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn. ↗

— Octavia E. Butler

#experience #massochism #memory #pain #wisdom

...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. ↗

— Charles Yu

#life #memory #time #wisdom #experience

More than anything, this place feels familiar. I bury my hands in the hot sand and think about the embodiment of memory or, more specifically, our natural ability to carry the past in our bodies and minds. Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation. I quietly thank this ancestor of mine for surviving the trip so that I could one day return. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#ancestral-continuum #ancestral-dna #ancestral-memory #journeying #life-journey

Life is a movement, a constant movement in relationship; and thought, trying to capture that movement in terms of the past, as memory, is afraid of life. ↗

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

#freedom #life #memory #movement #past

If my name were Mememem, and I had just ran into someone who should have known my name but couldn’t recall it, I’d probably say, “I can’t believe you don’t remememember my name. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#humor #memory #name #strange #weird

We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed. Even the most voluminous archives cannot help. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#memory #life

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. ↗

— A. E. Housman

#bristles #ceases #into #line #memory

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library. ↗

— Anthony Hecht

#call #composes #good #his #i