#painsmemory

[painsmemory]

Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor

[painsmemory]

The sweetness of the past? Our memory of it, since to remember it is to make it present, and it isn’t present nor ever can be – absurdity, my love, absurdity.

Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet, ed. & trans. by Richard Zenith (Penguin Classics, 2002)

[painsmemory]

Memories come to mind like excavated statues that have misplaced their heads.

Wislawa Szymborska, from her poem Travel Elegy, collected in View with a Grain of Sand, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh 

[painsmemory]

Why did I have to warm up stale memories like this?

Haruki Murakami, from his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, tr. by Jay Rubin

[painsmemory]

I stood there and watched as the bus disappeared around the next corner. After it was gone, I felt a strange emptiness inside, a hopeless kind of feeling like that of a small child who has been left alone in an unfamiliar neighborhood.

Haruki Murakami, from his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, tr. by Jay Rubin

[painsmemory]

So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.

Stephen King, from his novel Wizard and Glass

[painsmemory]

Even now that feeling would sometimes spring up. The sense of leaving himself. Of observing his own pain as if it were not his own.

Haruki Murakami, from his novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, translated by Philip Gabriel

[painsmemory]

I miss you,” he admitted. “I’m here,” she said. “That’s when I miss you most. When you’re here. When you aren’t here, when you’re just a ghost from the past or a dream from another life, it’s easier then.

Neil Gaiman, from his novel American Gods