Memory Keepers Quotes

We are our own memory-keepers and we have failed ourselves. It is like that game we played in school as children. Sitting in a circle, one student whispers a phrase into another student's ear and the phrase is passed around until the last student in the circle repeats what she hears, only to find out it is nothing like what it is supposed to be.
This is our life now. ~ Carrie Ryan

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it. ~ Kim Edwards

I had a great life even before 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' took off. I really enjoy teaching. ~ Kim Edwards

I am Cuban, and yet, I am not. I don't know where I fit here, in the land of my grandparents, attempting to recreate a Cuba that no longer exists in reality. Perhaps we're the dreamers in all of this. The hopeful ones. Dreaming of a Cuba we cannot see with our eyes, that we cannot touch, whose taste lingers on our palates, with the tang of memory. The exiles are the historians, the memory keepers of a lost Cuba, one that's nearly forgotten. ~ Chanel Cleeton

The love was within her all the time and its only renewal came from giving it away"

The Memory Keeper's Daughter ~ Kim Edwards

A curiosity: my name, Rem, will someday come to mean a line of text in a language spoken only by machines. Specifically, it will mean a line that the machines can safely ignore
one that's only there as a mnemonic, a placeholder, for the people who give the machines their orders. A REM line might say something like "this bit is a self-contained sub loop" or "Steve Perlman in Marketing is a shit." The program as a whole rolls on past and around the REM lines, ignores them completely as it takes its shape, moves through its pre-ordained sequences, unfolds its wonders. My mother named me well. ~ Louise Carey

Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~Candle ~ Gregory Maguire

My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go. This, I thought, must be the kindness that God does for them and for us, since He gives so many infants such a little while to bide with us. ~ Geraldine Brooks

The memory may not change in form, but years of underlining give it a weight that can become tremendous. Each of the many, many times you are called to remember the cold of abandonment, the bars, and the loneliness, this experience says deep inside you, 'You see? That's the way life is, after all. ~ Joanne Greenberg

Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory. ~ Rick Perlstein

I remember when we kissed. I still feel it on my lips. The time you danced with me with no music playing. I remember the simple things. I remember till I cry. But the one thing I wish I'd forget, the memory I wanna forget is goodbye. ~ Miley Cyrus

in truth it's himself that makes this hard for him. When he's most himself, he's most aware of what's happening, where he's been and where he's going, how he has to get there. He knows when he's been raving, he knows when he's been lost entirely, he may perhaps have some ghost memory of each. And he knows there will be more of each to come, and less of this. Ultimately he knows there will be nothing, and that for him is worse than either. He can lie there and savour his own dying, feel the slow determined tread of it, chart every separate step he's yet to take. This terrifies him, but not so much as what follows, that logical final step, the being dead. ~ Chaz Brenchley

If he had to have strange powers, Aden wished they could have been more like hers. That voodoo voice would have made his life a lot easier; he could have sent certain people (cough Ozzie cough) away with no memory of him. ~ Gena Showalter

That's how the past came back... not with the same characters, like in novels, but with new ones that trigger the memory of fears that haven't been expunged. And that was very dangerous. I mustn't try to forget the past, as I had thought[...]; instead I should remember it all, so I could keep it under control and use it to strengthen myself against the new experiences that surely lay in wait. ~ Goliarda Sapienza

Sometimes, the smallest moments in your life have the greatest impact. They soar straight into a place deep inside you, and resonate with the very core of your heart, sinking deep into your memory, to remind you later, that life and love can bring you magic you didn't know existed. ~ Angela Richardson

An act of kindness may take only a moment of our time, but when captured in the heart the memory lives forever. ~ Molly Friedenfeld

Once I'd reached the point where I could squirrel away more than 30 digits a minute in memory palaces, I still only sporadically used the techniques to memorize the phone numbers of people I actually wanted to call. I found it was just too simple to punch them into my cell phone. ~ Joshua Foer

The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been. ~ Jodi Picoult

It's the spark of love's memory inside your heart that recognizes them and most of the time they recognize you too. That spark is the magnet that always brings us back to each other. Like glue, it binds us together with an invisible cord from lifetime to lifetime, soul mate to soul mate. ~ Kate McGahan

Should we Knights, in years to come, dwindle into memory, perhaps the world will recall that in the days of our demise we stood, hewing at the fetters of captive men. ~ A.S. Peterson

I know thou art gone to the home of thy rest
Then why should my soul be so sad?
I know thou art gone where the weary are blest,
And the mourner looks up, and is glad;
I know thou hast drank of the Lethe that flows
In a land where they do not forget,
That sheds over memory only repose,
And takes from it only regret. ~ Thomas Kibble Hervey

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man's memory. That is our duty. If we don't fulfill it, we feel unhappy. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

If memory serves, the last time we met there were also exploding starships," I said, to Wilson. "That's odd," Lowen said. "The last time I saw Harry, there were exploding starships, too." "It's coincidental," Wilson said, looking at Lowen and then at me. ~ John Scalzi

Maybe in this nation of the flesh,
Distance will hold us together,

as I try to remember her bent low
to the bleeding heart's small petals,
and around us, buds of wild lilies
where once there was a shallow gorge
that dipped into the clearing and horses
claimed the fields; and that one night
she couldn't sleep, she walked

into the same field to behold
the stars she once named for me.
Maybe now I will understand what secrets
she wanted to share that night
while I pretended to sleep.
Years later, we returned to that place
only to discover that the rains
had flooded the field into a lake,
as if all memory was fiction,
as if memory had turned things around. ~ Eugene Gloria

I'm a writer who simply can't know what I'm writing about until the writing lets me discover it. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains. ~ Floyd Skloot

Our horses plunged up the trail.
"Go on…Go!" Bran jerked one hand toward the mountains, then swayed in his saddle.
Another arrow sang overhead.
"I won't leave you," I snapped.
"Go. Our people…Carry on the fight."
"Bran--"
In answer he yanked the reins on his terrified horse, which lunged toward mine. Gritting his teeth, he leaned out and whipped the ends of his reins across the mare's shoulder. "Go!"
My mount panicked, leaped forward. My neck snapped back. I clutched to the horse's mane with all my strength. The last glimpse I had of Bran was of his white face and his anxious eyes watching me as he and his mount fell back.
And then I was on my own.
For a time the mare raced straight up the trail while the only thought I could hold in my mind was, A trap? A trap? And then the image, seen endlessly, of Bran being shot.
Then a scrap of memory floated up before my inner eye. Again I saw the elegant Renselaeus dining room, heard the Marquis's refined drawling voice: My people are taking and holding the Vesingrui fortress on your border. For now they are wearing the green uniform…
A trap. Cold fury washed through me. They have betrayed us.
It was then that I recovered enough presence of mind to realize that I was in my home territory at last, and I could leave the trail anytime. The horse had recovered from the panic and was trotting. So I recaptured the reins, leading the horse across the side of the mountain toward the ~ Sherwood Smith

He got lost in a memory for a moment, then glanced over at Gina. "What I miss most ... she always used to say good-night just before she'd drift off to sleep. I miss those words, the good-night." "Someone was there, someone to share the end of the day," Gina said softly. She understood. Bishop nodded. "Someone was there. That's why you get married, Gina. Beyond all the other details of why, it's having someone there when the days ends. It's being together and sharing life. ~ Dee Henderson

The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is reworked into a new form, one that narrates events and gives the listener a path through these events that leads to some fragment of wisdom. The one who hears takes the story in, even to a place not visible or conscious to the mind, yet there. In this inner place a story from another life suffers a subtle change. As it enters the memory of the listener it is augmented by reflection, by other memories, and even the body hearing and responding in the moment of the telling. By such transmissions, consciousness is woven. ~ Susan Griffin

If I shut my eyes it returns: the evocation of a whole wood, a whole world of wood-darkness and flowers and birds and late summer silence, of a million leaves turning mellowly to death. It becomes then more than the mere memory of a wood, the first and the best wood I have ever known. It is the redistillation of another and more lovely world. ~ H.E. Bates

You shudder beneath the orange glow, the wet reptile streets, while heading back to the muted torture of your dirty room, where some cruel memory sours the walls, viciously, like wisps of a flaming hell. ~ Brian Alan Ellis

Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture. ~ Terry Pratchett

For a while now, I have been conscious of a tension in my relationship with you," Svetlana said. "And I think that's the reason. It's because we both make up narratives about our own lives. I think that's why we decided not to live together next year. Although obviously it's also why we're so attracted to each other."

"Everyone makes up narratives about their own lives."

"But not to the same extent. Think about my roommates. Fern, for example. I don't mean that she doesn't have an inner life, or that she doesn't think about the past or make plans for the future. But she doesn't compulsively rehash everything that happens to her in the form of a story. She's in my story – I'm not in hers. That makes her and me unequal, but it also gives our relationship a kind of stability, and safeness. We each have our different roles. It's like an unspoken contract. With you, there's more instability and tension, because I know you're making up a story, too, and in our story, I'm just a character."

"I don't know," I said. "I still think everyone experiences their own life as a narrative. If you didn't have some kind of ongoing story in mind, how would you know who you were when you woke up in the morning?"

"That's a weak definition of narrative. That's saying that narrative is just memory plus causality. But, for us, the narrative has aesthetics, too."

"But I don't think that's because of our personalities," I said. Isn't it more about ~ Elif Batuman

Hatred is internal calamity that destroys the keeper ~ Aftab Alam

Your body has such a memory. ~ Kristanna Loken

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

Many think of memory as rote learning, a linear stuffing of the brain with facts, where understanding is irrelevant. When you teach it properly, with imagination and association, understanding becomes a part of it. ~ Tony Buzan

She listens, eyes wise and kind, arms holding me, holding my pain until it dissipates. She kisses away my tears, just as I had done for her, and I know beyond doubt that she's the woman I'll spend my life with. That every memory is made sweeter when she is here to share it. That this is why we all crave love and relationships, connection, because alone we are floating in emptiness, but with another we have someone to carry those memories with us. It makes life more real. It makes us more real. - Cade Savage, Kiss Me in Paris ~ Kimberly Kinrade

He expelled a long breath, smiled slightly as if in memory. I heard them in their room. She said she was a bit tired, and he said that perhaps it was time to see what came next. ~ Meljean Brook

But that evening, driving back to the plant in the little underground train, I firmly believed my bad luck was over. One of the cars I had admired that morning took me back to the city. Fortunately some shops were still open here and there; I could buy myself a new suit. For Teresa I bought a nice summer dress with red stripes, which reminded me of the one in which I had seen her for the first time. It fitted to perfection – I knew her measurements. She had shared many hours with me, mainly bitter ones.

We went out for dinner; it was one of the days one never forgets. Quite soon the happenings in Zapparoni's garden began to fade in my memory. There is much that is illusory in techniques. But I never forgot Teresa's words, and her smile when she spoke. Now she was happy about me. This smile was more powerful than all the automatons – it was a ray of reality. ~ Ernst Junger

And of the fact that every vision of the past is a vision of the blind ~ Jacques Roubaud

Yeye shifted in her seat as Roma stared down at her angrily. "There are inter-realm laws I must abide by, that the soul must abide by as well when it comes to an appointed manifestation. Whoever was in the world before can not go into the new world. That identity must be forsaken. It must - "
"Forsaken or forgotten?" Roma barked.
"Forsaken," Yeye answered. "Unless you're putting this soul into a blank state like that of a child, it can not be forgotten. It has to be forsaken. That's the rule or you get no soul."
"So you're telling me that this soul will remember but will never be able to be that person it was?" Roma asked.
"I'm telling you a new memory must be formed with absolutely no reference to the previous."
"What the freak is that?" Roma asked, visibly agitated. "You can form new memories while holding on to preexisting ones."
Yeye stood. "Yes Roma, you're right. But you can also form new memories while you are unable to access the previous ones."
"Such it would have a drive that belongs to it but would never be able to access or be forbidden to access it?" Roma asked.
Yeye's voice was low. "I'm afraid that's the way it is going to have to be."
Roma shook his head vehemently. "Exactly which way is that Yeye. Exactly which way is that in common terms?"
Yeye spoke in her most resolute tone yet. "You will never be able to know whether or not this soul is Mara."
Roma gained silence, breathing in and out rapidl ~ Dew Platt

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams. ~ Gaston Bachelard

Soon a whole guild of low-priced shrine keepers around Europe named their own pope - Boldface the Relatively Shameless, Discount Pope of Prague. The price war was on [ ... ] The Retail Pope would offer cheesy bacon toppings on the Host with communion and the Discount Pope would counter with topless nun night for midnight mass. ~ Christopher Moore

As a child, I remember my dad would sometimes drive me into town with him to play pinball machines together. It's a bittersweet memory but also a favorite. ~ Iggy Azalea

It's clear that the largest things are contained in the smallest. There can be no doubt about it. At this very moment, as I write, there's a planetary configuration on the table, the entire Cosmos if you like: a thermometer, a coin, an aluminum spoon and a porcelain cup. A key, a cell phone, a piece of paper and a pen. And one of my gray hairs, whose atoms preserve the memory of the origins of life, of the cosmic Catastrophe that gave the world its beginning. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory. ~ Oliver Sacks