memory

More than once I’ve realized: … our memory is far from an ideal instrument. It is not only arbitrary and capricious, it is also chained to time, like a dog. … we look at the past from today; we cannot look at it from anywhere else.

What did your clothes smell like? It wasn’t your own scent, Arthur thought, not to you anyway. His clothes at Hal’s always smelt of the Somerset earth, damp and iron-rich. In London, he remembered cedar and laundry detergent. And the particular scent of Eliza. The trace of chemicals from the lab where she worked, and the perfume she wore, a verbena

There’s a park bench, in my hometown, that I don’t like to walk past because it’s haunted by a breakup with my first love. I see ghosts on that bench that are invisible to anyone else except, perhaps, her. And I feel them too. Just as human worlds are haunted with minds and faces, they’re haunted with memories. We think of the act of ‘seeing’ as th

Memories are like hibernating bears. They disappear into some dark cave until you forget they were ever there, and that’s when they wake up and roar.

Had she changed as much as her hair? Probably. She wondered if she could even be considered the same person now that every cell in her body had been replaced, more than once. It didn’t seem to matter so much when the effect was growth and health but now that shrinkage and damage were the order of events, it mattered a lot. Was it possible that her

My goal first of all is to get at the truth of those years. Of those days. Without sham feelings. Just after the war this woman would have told of one war; after decades, of course, it changes somewhat, because she adds her whole life to this memory. Her whole self. How she lived those years, what she read, saw, whom she met. Finally, whether she i

Writing from his hiding place in the basement of a U.S. embassy building in Beijing, astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, one of China’s preeminent dissidents, baldly stated that the multiplicity of Tiananmen literature heralded “the failure of the ‘Technique of Forgetting History,’ which has been an important device of rule by the Chinese Communists.” Facts

The night is so thick she can tell she is there only by the scraping of her feet and the tap, tapping of the stick in the loose gravel. A moonless night with only the call of the katydids and marsh frogs. A night to swallow you up, the stars hid by clouds, and memory guiding her tired feet home.