Joseph Conrad Quotes

The years leech at a man's memories, even those he has vowed never to forget.

A lot of my past is gone from my mind.

It's been 25 years now, and truthfully, time sometimes blurs the memory.

As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. ... I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.

But it's far too late for us; ring, hair, letters, photographs - all traces of our love will be scattered then, like an anagram.

Day by day and night by night we were together - all else has long been forgotten by me.

Memories, so sweet and bitter.. they had both nourished and devoured him for so many years. Until a time came when they began to fade, turning faint and blurred, only an ache to be quickly pushed away because it went to your heart. For what was the use of remembering all you had lost?

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.

When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.

History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.

Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.

Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood.

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.

If all the historic books of the Bible were blotted from the memory of mankind, nothing of value would be lost.

Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting: So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring, Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.

What if I left my memory in the future and I have to catch up to it?

We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.

The memory fades, and I’m left hanging on to the ghosts of his words.

Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.