T. E. Hulme Quotes

Memory is a capricious and arbitrary creature. You never can tell what pebble she will pick up from the shore of life to keep among her treasures, or what inconspicuous flower of the field she will preserve as the symbol of "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." . . . And yet I do not doubt that the most Important things are always the best remembered.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

I have a very vivid memory.

But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

It seemed uncanny that words, spread across a page just so, had the power to transport me to another time or place. But they could.

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

I still feel, as I did when I was six or seven, that books are simply the best way to experience a story.

I didn't have picture books - there weren't many around when I was a child.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Writers and believers live their lives haunted by the same question: What happens to our days once they disappear? The objective fact is that each day that passes is lost forever, as forbidden to us as the dead. But prayer and fiction offer a different answer. Those lost days still live among us, written in each person's hand, turned into stories.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Everyone has ways of trying to find a way to memorise our past. There's something very poetic about that.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.

I'll be a story in your head. But that's OK. We're all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? Because it was, you know; it was the best.

Nothing recalls the past like music.

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

In memory, you can access something from the past, anything that you've experienced that you remember - it's there. Now, you might have a memento of it in a photograph or in a film or a building or some clothes that you wore. There might be something that connects you to this memory. But all of us are just all caught in this time, whatever that is.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

Sharing tales of those we've lost is how we keep from really losing them.

Few have wished for memory so much as they have longed for forgetfulness.