Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)
Context: The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).
“Drunk with triumph, I cuddled in my rocking cradle and ransacked every unvisited chamber of the memory…. to see the residue take life and meaning in the light of the great revelation.”
Source: Literary Years and War (1900-1918), The Riddle Of The Sands (1903), p. 276.
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Robert Erskine Childers 30
Irish nationalist and author 1870–1922Related quotes
Quoted in the Burbank Leader http://www.burbankleader.com/entertainment/tn-blr-masielalusha-20101027,0,7134384.story/
“He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man’s billfold.”
Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 1 “Between Timid and Timbuktu” (p. 22)
Source: Song Tear Me Down, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwIHlq_zSaw
The Race of My Life: An Autobiography Milkha Singh (2013)
At the dedication of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California http://www.planbproductions.com/postnobills/reagan1.html (4 November 1991), the inscription on Reagan's tomb
Post-presidency (1989–2004)
“Time devours our feeble mortality, leaving us with but the sour residue of memory.”
Marvin nodded. “Yet this ineffable and ungraspable quantity,” he replied, “this time which no man may possess, is in truth our only possession.”
Source: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 24 (p. 110)