Diane Ackerman Quotes

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

Continents of memory had been lost.

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

We couldn't understand because we were too far... and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, those ages that had gone, leaving hardly a sign... and no memories.

What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?...the thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow.

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?

A lot of my past is gone from my mind.

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

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

I don't remember most of the '60s and '70s.

I don't remember much of my childhood. My father passed away when I was six, and sadly, I don't have the fuzziest, foggiest memory of him - what his voice was like, anything he ever said to me, nothing. My early years are a total blur.

They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.

He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.

We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game.

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.

Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.

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.

What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.

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

That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side a closed door that he’s lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.

It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.

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 of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect.

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