Anthony Doerr Quotes

One of the strangest aspects of living with certain kinds of memory loss is knowing that the forgetting is happening.

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.

How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.

As you get older, you worry about your memory.

You don't just forget things overnight.

My memory is not that good anymore.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

But though first love's impassioned blindness Has passed away in colder light, I still have thought of you with kindness, And shall do, till our last goodnight. The ever-rolling silent hours Will bring a time we shall not know, When our young days of gathering flowers Will be an hundred years ago.

The aged are terrible - mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered round them.

The French say that to part is to die a little. To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity.

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.

I don't know their names. Their names have been erased from my memory banks. If I tried to bring 'em back, I'd get shocked.

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

I have lost my short-term memory - I'm just getting blonder by the day.

The results would have stayed on the watch face until the batteries died. But trying to make time stand still this way would have been a mistake. It is just as important to erase times eventually as to save them at first.

By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.

All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.

My memory's pretty much gone.

If it's hard to remember, it'll be difficult to forget.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

I am terrible with people's names.

I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'

Time is not kind to everything.