Ancestral Memory Quotes

Forge your path. Crack your ancestors wide open. By any means necessary, unearth your roots. ~ Gabby Rivera

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

A plaited link exists between every person and his or her ancestors, not simply through genealogical records, but in the same manner that the soul of a child, from which we sprang from, traces a direct connection to the matured soul of the adult. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

It's hard enough judging the motives of people who live in our own times, let alone the motives of those who've been dead three hundred years. They can't come back and tell us, can they? ~ Susanna Kearsley

The things that come to us easily, our propensities, are carried on a deep subconscious level into our next life. There are no coincidences. ~ Raquel Cepeda

After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don't have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole! ~ Steve Toltz

Now and then the image of the man she has seen only two or three times, and for moments at that, the man who has such a tiny space in the exterior events of her life and such an absorbing space in her mind and her heart, virtually monopolizing them altogether - his image blurs before the weary eyes of her memory. She no longer sees him, no longer recalls his features, his silhouette, barely remembers his eyes. Still, that image is all she has of him. She goes mad at the thought that she might lose that image, that her desire (which, granted, tortures her, but which is entirely herself now, in which she has taken refuge, fleeing everything she values, the way you value your own preservation, your life, good or bad) - that her desire could vanish, leaving nothing but a feeling of malaise, a suffering in dreams, of which she would no longer know the cause, would no longer see it even in her mind or cherish it there. But then Monsieur de Laléande's image reappears after that momentary blurring of inner vision. Her grief can resume and it is almost a joy. ~ Marcel Proust

Don't get me wrong: I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Even the word 'cancer' brings back the nausea and pain, the fear I felt, and the heartbreak I saw in my parents' faces. The smells that fill hospitals and the constant tired feeling that comes with treatment are also permanently stuck in my memory. ~ Jon Lester

Your creations carry on your legacy longer than your kids will ever do. ~ Amit Kalantri

I have a very vivid memory of the way my parents spoke, and the 50's that I grew up in are closer to the 20's, I think, than today in many, many ways. ~ Gail Carson Levine

The quantum hologram is a mechanism to explain this concept of the ancients of the Akashic Records. It also explains Rupert Sheldrake's work among animals [his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, leading to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory]. ~ Edgar Mitchell

Here is a shared memory that we didn't share, forgot to share, for almost ninety years. ~ Mary McAleese

Memory is the most potent truth.
Show me history untouched by memories
and you show me lies. ~ Carlos Eire

Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile. ~ George Eliot

History and memory aren't the same thing[...] History doesn't abide acts of the imagination but memories depend on it. And memories are as much what we've forgotten as what we recall. History cannot be forgotten. ~ Peter Geye

I see a cathedral, for instance, one that's stood for centuries and I marvel and I wonder ... How many people passed through the doors? What did they pray for? How many wars did they wish to see ended? How many christenings, weddings, and funerals? Same thing with a record, I guess. Who bought it? Did they ever make love while it was playing? How many times did they read the notes in the cover? Did a song on the album change their life? I suppose it's odd to think about things like that. ~ Benjamin R. Smith

Behave," he gritted at her as if he was in control of this, of her, of his own wild response, "and this will be your reward. Disobey me, and this will be nothing but a memory. ~ Caitlin Crews

Hear me, Daenerys Targaryen. The glass candles are burning. Soon comes the pale mare, and after her the others. Kraken and dark flame, lion and griffin, the sun's son and the mummer's dragon. Trust none of them. Remember the Undying. Beware the perfumed seneschal."
"Reznak? Why should I fear him?" Dany rose from the pool. Water trickled down her legs, and gooseflesh covered her arms in the cool night air. "If you have some warning for me, speak plainly. What do you want of me, Quaithe?"
Moonlight shown in the woman's eyes. "To show you the way."
"I remember the way. I go north to go south, east to go west, back to go forward. And to touch the light I have to pass beneath the shadow." She squeezed the water from her silvery hair. "I am half-sick of riddling. In Qarth I was a beggar, but here I am a queen. I command you-"
"Daenerys. Remember the Undying. Remember who you are."
"The blood of the dragon." But my dragons are roaring in the darkness. "I remember the Undying. Child of three, they called me. Three mounts they promised me, three fires, and three treasons. One for blood and one for gold and one for . . ."
"Your Grace?" Missandei stood in the door of the queen's bedchamber, a lantern in her hand. "Who are you talking to?"
Dany glanced back toward the persimmon tree. There was no woman there. No hooded robe, no lacquer mask, no Quaithe.
A shadow. A Memory. No one. ~ George R.R. Martin

Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course. ~ Joseph Joubert

It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory. ~ Paul Theroux

I always try to write from memory, and I always try to use memory as an editor. So when I'm thinking of something like a relationship or whatever, then I'm letting my memory tell me what the important things were. ~ Jeffrey Brown

Loss alone is but the wounding of a heart; it is memory that makes it our ruin. ~ Brian Ruckley

He stared at it in utter disbelief while his secretary, Peters, who'd only been with him for a fortnight, muttered a silent prayer of gratitude for the break and continued scribbling as fast as he could, trying futilely to catch up with his employer's dictation.
"This," said Ian curtly, "was sent to me either by mistake or as a joke. In either case, it's in excruciatingly bad taste." A memory of Elizabeth Cameron flickered across Ian's mind-a mercenary, shallow litter flirt with a face and body that had drugged his mind. She'd been betrothed to a viscount when he'd met her. Obviously she hadn't married her viscount-no doubt she'd jilted him in favor of someone with even better prospects. The English nobility, as he well knew, married only for prestige and money, then looked elsewhere for sexual fulfillment. Evidently Elizabeth Cameron's relatives were putting her back on the marriage block. If so, they must be damned eager to unload her if they were willing to forsake a title for Ian's money…That line of conjecture seemed so unlikely that Ian dismissed it. This note was obviously a stupid prank, perpetrated, no doubt, by someone who remembered the gossip that had exploded over that weekend house party-someone who thought he'd find the note amusing.
Completely dismissing the prankster and Elizabeth Cameron from his mind, Ian glanced at his harassed secretary who was frantically scribbling away. "No reply is necessary," he said. As he spoke he flipped the message acr ~ Judith McNaught

What is memory but a story about how we have lived? ~ Mark Doty

Our reading can affect our imaginations in ways of which we are not consciously aware. It is quite common ... to re-read something after a gap of many years and realize that it has been there all along, without any memory of where it was first encountered. But it may have been working away all the time. ~ Tom Shippey

I don't believe environment has the slightest bit to do with anything - I only believe in ancestral influence. It would have made no difference whether I'd been brought up in a reform school, or on the island of Lesbos. ~ Preston Sturges

Our loved ones pass away or simply leave our lives forever too soon, and we think to ourselves, "I wasn't ready for you to leave. It just wasn't time," because we're never truly ready, because it's never truly time.
So we keep them in our memories.
And when we regret that we don't have more memories of them, maybe our minds give us more gifts; gradually we find ourselves remembering them being with us in times and places that they couldn't have been, and gradually we stop correcting ourselves because, well, we want them to have been there. ~ Dathan Auerbach

Ballroom dancing was inherently social, but steps replaced words and beats ironed out pauses. The shy, the awkward, and the weird found a home where good rhythm or a barn of a memory vanquished their shyness, awkwardness, and weirdness. Some got good while others stayed middling. Everyone, though, had fun. ~ Erin Bomboy

I'm not sure if the question's rhetorical or if she thinks I have a clue to her metaphysical mystery. And I'm in no state to answer either way because I'm crying. I don't realize it till I taste the sale against my lips. I can't remember the last time I've cried but, once I accept the mortification of sniveling like a baby, the floodgates open and I'm sobbing now, in front of Mia. In front of the whole damn world. ~ Gayle Forman

And all of these involved remembering that someone existed whom you hadn't thought of in a while, an ability that had atrophied in the minds of people who could not remember a time without social networking, just as people near the end of the twentieth century had lost the ability to remember the long and semi-random strings of digits that made up phone numbers once cellphones began to do that for them. ~ Dexter Palmer

The willful amnesia afflicting the sciences in general contrasts sharply with the importance given to memory by the humanities. Literature, philosophy, politics, and the visual arts, including photography and filmmaking, feed on memory. Practitioners of the humanities need memory to deepen and refine their thinking. ~ James Hillman

When I am alone
You'll come back to me
It's happened before
It's called memory

I'm not even sure
If I know where to start
But starting is second
First we must part
I'm too tired now
To fight anymore
We're saying goodbye
At the innermost door ~ Leonard Cohen

I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines. ~ Thomas Lynch

But you won't help her son," said Harry. "She gave me her life, but you won't give me a memory. ~ J.K. Rowling

Like the subconscious, like love, like memory, like time itself, like every single one of us, the church is built on the ruins of subsequent restorations, there is no rock bottom, there is no first anything, no last anything, just layers and secret passageways and interlocking chambers, like the Christian Catacombs, and right along these, even a Jewish Catacomb. ~ Andre Aciman

I tell you, because military training is not publicly recognised by the state, you must not make that an excuse for being a whit less careful in attending to it yourself. For you may rest assured that there is no kind of struggle, apart from war, and no undertaking in which you will be worse off by keeping your body in better fettle.

"For in everything that men do the body is useful; and in all uses of the body it is of great importance to be in as high a state of physical efficiency as possible. Why, even in the process of thinking, in which the use of the body seems to be reduced to a minimum, it is matter of common knowledge that grave mistakes may often be traced to bad health.

"And because the body is in a bad condition, loss of memory, depression, discontent, insanity often assail the mind so violently as to drive whatever knowledge it contains clean out of it. But a sound and healthy body is a strong protection to a man, and at least there is no danger then of such a calamity happening to him through physical weakness: on the contrary, it is likely that his sound condition will serve to produce effects the opposite of those that arise from bad condition. And surely a man of sense would submit to anything to obtain the effects that are the opposite of those mentioned in my list.

"Besides, it is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty t ~ Xenophon Memorabilia. 371BC Marchant Translation

I have no memory, any at all, of actually performing the play, no recall in terms of the lines. I can't tell you any line from any play I've ever done. ~ Bill Nighy

Noah," she whispers in reprimand.
"You've never complained when I've tried to undress you before."
Echo readjusts so she can see me, and for the first time since this morning, those eyes dance. "Yes, I have."
"When?"
"The last day of school."
"So you've complained once." When I led her to the nook of the abandoned hallway in the basement near my locker. I only meant to sneak in for a kiss during lunch, but things got hot and heavy and well ... sue me. "I didn't buy a yearbook, so I was memory-making. ~ Katie McGarry

When I met with Dr. Treffet in his hometown of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, he told me that these innate skills are, in his words, "factory-installed software", or "genetic" memory.
......
Why the brain suppresses these remarkable abilities is still a mystery, but sometimes, when the brain is diseased or damaged, it relents and unleashes the inner genius. ~ Jason Padgett

Godzilla, you see, is toppled, is depleted, is immobile and breathless, the non-conversative dictator and his polemical primeval tyranny dashed to social smithereens... for some his demise will evince agitation, adulation and appraisal, but for me, Yasuhiro Dustin T-Bird, it returns the lingering largesse of an inconsolable fear. The fear is this: that there's a thing as big as pirate continents in the China Sea that we've together mythologised up to now currently obstructing the procession of metropolitan traffic all the way to Yoyogi. His formidable draconian jaw with its legend of gargantuan teeth slacks open like a lifelong foe's long-withheld liability, and sulphur rents the air in acrid, acid plumes as though the most cultured and violent yellowcake fart in categorical memory. ~ Kirk Marshall

I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Stern and white as a tomb, older than the memory of the dead, and built by men or devils beyond the recording of myth, is the mansion in which we dwell. ~ Clark Ashton Smith

His last encounter with Wendy... Hell, she'd been the one to hurt his feelings.
The best sex of his life, and she'd kicked him out as soon as it was over, told him not to bother with calling because it was strictly a one-time thing. Told him, actually, while he'd still been inside her.
He groaned at the memory as he slipped behind the wheel, turning on the heat the second he had the engine started.
His day was shaping up to be an ass kicker. Which was saying something, considering that the day before included his arrest, a concussion, and a near drowning. ~ Dana Marton

Time's arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original. ~ Ken Liu

Even the poorest and most squalid life is an Aeschylean drama, if you think about the tragedy of the bodily functions, the whispering of the secretions, the silence of the organs, the exertions of memory, the groping of the voice, the blood that courses, the mortal miasmas, the riots among microorganisms, the spermatic wars, the cellular eruptions, the pestilences of the nerves, the biochemical predestinations, and the fate that slowly but surely introduces you to the final infection, to the sores, the exploded boils, the snakes of madness, the furious bitches of Hunger. ~ Guido Ceronetti

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers. ~ Gaston Bachelard

Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe. ~ Herman Melville

I turned to face Audrey, and everything I loved was right there in her eyes, the memories tangible: the schooldays and sleepovers, the cheap bottles of wine and sappy chick flicks. She was there for my mother's drunken relapses, there to hold me until I fell asleep the first time the ex from Seattle hit me. It was all there, and my God, each memory was suddenly sacred and the sun rose and set upon it. ~ Rachael Wade