Edna O'Brien Quotes

Scents evoke very, very powerful memories, whether it's the scent of someone that you know and someone that you love, or if it's a meal that your mother made.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

Nothing awakens reminiscence like an aroma.

How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire

Recalling, for me, is a great way of living, so not to forget.

So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

What does it remember like?

I can still remember the first time I heard Tori Amos. It was the fall of 1993, and I was in the back of a colossal '79 Lincoln Coupe Mark V, embarking on some otherwise forgettable road trip somewhere in the Deep South.

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

You never forget where you were when you write a song; it's a very proper memory, so I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing for each track. It was like going into a time machine.

He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life.

What is that unforgettable line?

I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

Your red dress,’ she said, and laughed. But I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. I will remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now.

Nothing recalls the past like music.

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.

Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!

Certain scents can evoke so much feeling, nostalgia, and trigger beautiful memories.

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

I open journal, I look at the picture and I remember where I was. And I remember the time of day, the temperature of the air, what music was playing, or who was talking to me, or who was looking over my shoulder and what conversations we had and the smells of the earth and the time of year it was. It's all there for me in a way that we don't get looking at a snapshot. Most of us look back at a snapshot from ten years ago and say, where was that? We don't even remember where we were.