The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Tag: memory, time

Daniel D. Victor

Each of us, I think, adopts a comfortable and familiar era or place in which to plant ourselves; and from then on, that which disagrees with our memories — a new building here, a change in paint there — is forever jarring and anachronistic.

Philippa Pearce

Nothing stands still, except in our memory.

Time — how it expands to fill the spaces you create; how it makes meagre experiences seem never-ending. Whenever he heard people talk about the ravages of time, about how it robbed and deprived, Justin always smiled; because for him, time was an accomplice, plugging the gaps and fleshing out morsels of memory so he would have something substantial to hang on to. That way, however little he had seen or felt, he would always feel as if he had more: a life far richer than the truth.

I wished, more than anything, to forget. But what I had, more than anything, was time to remember.

…I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

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

The instant is gone, time has carried us into the realm of memory, it was like this, no, it was not, and everything becomes what we choose to invent.

The wooden devil got a good laugh out of the ones who passed by, though. They were so funny she couldn’t even feel sorry for them. They tried so hard to keep track of time. Whenever they were together they couldn’t let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that they were either forgotten or misremembered.

Back there in the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time.

I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some thins you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still here. If a house burns down, it’s done, but the place–the picture of it–stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or know, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.

He was thinking of that time, the way one does on long journeys when rootlessness and boredom, lack of sleep or routine can summon from out of nowhere random stretches of the past, make them as real as a haunting. –Solar

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.