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As death approaches, memory erodes. Recent memories are the first to succumb. Death works its way backward until it reaches memory's earliest beginnings. Then memory flares up for an instant, just like a flame about to go out.

The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories
What I believe to be memories are probably daydreams. Still, my own sentimentality yearns for them as if they were the truth, suspect or twisted though they may be. I have forgotten that they were stories I heard from another and feel an intimacy with them as if they were my own direct memories.

The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories
I�m like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.

Waiting for Godot
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.

The Post-Office Girl
For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.

The World of Yesterday
If you want to keep your memories, you first have to live them.
Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.

The Dead
His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.

The Road
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