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1 " And he'd said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled. "
― Catherine Lacey , Nobody Is Ever Missing
2 " We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library "
― Carl Sagan
3 " Towards the end of the Second World War, when I was sixteen years old, I was taken out of school and forced into the army. After a brief period of training at a base in Wüzburg, I arrived at the front, which by that time had already crossed the Rhine into Germany. There were well over a hundred in my company, all of whom were very young. One evening the company commander sent me with a message to battalion headquarters. I wandered all night long through destroyed, burning villages and farms, and when in the morning I returned to my company I found only the dead, nothing but dead, overrun by a combined bomber and tank assault. I could see only dead and empty faces, where the day before I had shared childhood fears and youthful laughter. I remember nothing but a wordless cry. Thus I see myself to this very day, and behind this memory all my childhood dreams crumble away. "
― Johann Baptist Metz , A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity
4 " He made what apology he could and hurried home, overjoyed that the satisfaction of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having feigned for so long, when in Odette's company, a sort of indifference, he had not now, by a demonstration of jealousy, given her that proof of the excess of his own passion which, in a pair of lovers, fully and finally dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love the other enough. He never spoke to her of this misadventure, he cased even to think of it himself. But now and then his thoughts in their wandering course would come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would startle it into life, thrust it more deeply down into his consciousness, and leave him aching with a sharp, far-rooted pain. "
― Marcel Proust , Swann's Way
5 " ...she would have walked all the way up to East Sixty-Third Street, and probably 163rd Street, if it meant pouring even more into this memory that wasn't a memory. "
― , Searching for Grace Kelly
6 " I think someone gave me candy when I was younger, someone whose face I don't remember; a blank face from my nightmares. He gave them to me to cover up the taste of something vile, and I associate the candy with the vile act before it.”Dr. Jane moved over to the couch to sit next to me, put her arm around my shoulder, and cooed as if she were comforting a child. I felt like a child. I needed someone to hear the horror of this memory and explain what this might mean. "
