Quotes about memory

While history is what happened, it is also, just as important, how we think about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened

I am endowed by shame's vast memory, more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to shame.

Then he said what I knew—what I had always known—he would say. It is what the dead always say, and it is the only thing they say.

“Remember me.”

Memories refused to fit, or fitted but came unglued. Even months later, how would I know if some major tranche of myself remained lost?

...the dizzying vividness of the images of places and people that the letters have unlocked. Images so vivid she can only call them memories.

“Are there other Librarian ghosts here?” she asked.

“Ghosts? Yes, I suppose that’s the best word for it. Collections of memories, maybe. We are all the sum of our memories, after all.”

"All the big things hurt, the things you remember. If it doesn't hurt it's not important."

The past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.

Often you don't know how truly happy you were then until you look back and realize how much worse things could have been, how if certain things had turned out the slightest bit differently so many of your favourite people would never have crossed your path and what seemed at the time to be casual meetings and passing acquaintances would never have matured into deep, lifelong friendships. I've criss-crossed the world many times and every big city holds its own treasure-box of memories. I've had lovers from many different countries and I've fallen in love with whole countries, and, in the case of Africa, with a whole continent. People say you should measure yourself by the friends you have, and when I look at mine I'm more than content to be me. Through my life I made a world for myself just as Jimmy said I would, and the best thing of all is that I'm still happy to live in it, after all these years. (Prologue)

It’s no fun growing old, no fun at all. The drawers where you store memories get harder to open.

That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.

Anyone who’s taken statements from multiple witnesses to the same event will know how malleable memory is.