It is notorious that the memory strengthens as you lay burdens upon it, and becomes trustworthy as you trust it.
When I was 14, a camp counselor explained what "eating out" was and I vowed to never have it done to me. It seemed cannibalistic and unhygienic. I also remember that she claimed--in front of an entire cabin of girls--to have been "eaten out" by one of the maintenance men in a hot tub. Under hot water. Either something is amiss in my memory of this conversation or she found the most talented man on the planet and all hope is lost for the rest of us.
Sooner or later we all discover that the big moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these. You were born an original. Don't die a copy. There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. So mine's a double and I'll see you all in hell suckers!
How vast a memory has Love!
And your own life while it's happening to you never has any atmosphere until it's a memory.
Memory is the best of all gardens. Therein, winter and summer, the seeds of their past lie dormant, ready to spring into instant bloom at any moment the mind wishes to bring them to life.
I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn’t dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it’s harder to burn memories when you’ve still got life left. When you’re alive you have to learn how to live with things like regret.
Lovers may come and go, there was the memory of blood, the low call.
When you lose interest in anything, you also lose the memory for it.
A journal is more than a memory goad. It's therapeutic. The simple act of opening a notebook to put words down stills the crosscurrents of worry, drawing to focus the essential though patterms that best defines us, intersecting those thoughts with the condition of our life at that exact moment. A journal is one of the few anchors the human condition allows us.
I'm sorry to inform you that your 50 year warranty has expired on your back, knees, and memory. Luckily your lifetime warranty on your heart is still in effect. Of course, that becomes void and expires when you do.
Fortunately, I've also been an electrician, and that's a happy memory for me.
There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.
And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive "cry"). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals my old and valued friends Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.
Memory demands an image.
To me, pictures are about memory.
There's no way to release yourself from a memory. It ends when it wants to end, whether it's in a flash or long after you've begged it to stop.
Every day your memory grows dimmer - it doesn't haunt me like it did before.
Tasting a dish should be memorable If nothing remains in the memory of a single guest, then I have made a mistake.
I started to realize, a lot of times if you go into your memory, your sense memory, you know more than you think you do, from having watched and listened.