Hilary Mantel Quotes

I was trying to figure out what a memory feels like.

Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.

Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.

Memory: what wonders it performs in preserving and storing up things gone by - or rather, things that are

Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.

Some things we forget. But many things we remember on the mental screen, which is the biggest screen of all.

Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

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.

Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.

People sometimes forget when you remember, but they always remember when you forget.

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.

Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery.

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.

What we hold in our heads - our memory, our feelings, our thoughts, our sense of our own history - is the sum of our humanity.

About the only thing that I have - or had, because it's failing me lately - is my memory. I had a really good memory. I was always terribly protective of that fact.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

I have a memory like an elephant. I remember every elephant I've ever met.

I don't write diaries and things like that, but I have a fantastic memory. I call that like a magic carpet. I can really concentrate and travel back in the past I don't know how many years from now and evoke that space if I wanted.

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.