Colum McCann Quotes

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory

One often feels as though something had happened before, I remember. It comes quite close to you and stands there and you know it was just this way once before, exactly so; for an instant you almost know how it must go on, but then it disappears as you try to lay hold of it like smoke or a dead memory. "We could never remember, Isabelle," I say. "It's like the rain. That has also become one, out of two gasses, oxygen and hydrogen, which no longer remember they were once gasses. Now they are only rain and have no memory of an earlier time.

The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

But memory is an autumn leaf that murmurs a while in the wind and then is heard no more.

Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.

Of all the faculties of the mind, memory is the first that flourishes, and the first that dies.

What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

Sometimes memory tricks you. Sometimes beauty is best when it's distant.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

We do not hear what we hear..., only what we remember.

The problem with snapshots is that they replace actual memories. You lock down the moment and it becomes all there is of it.

Did you ever think about all of the nights you lived through and can't remember The ones that were so mundane your brain just didn't bother to record them. Hundreds, maybe thousands of nights come and go without being preserved by our memory. Does that ever freak you out? Like maybe your mind recorded all of the wrong nights?

My memory is not so good so my most memorable show is the last one I played. Songs are written with intention but they only emerge in the moment.

Photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

If i were to lose my memories, I would rely on music. There is so much of my story embedded in each.

To learn from experience, we must remember it, and, for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend.

Yea from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records.

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.