“You couldnt erase everything that caused you pain with recollection. Every memory was valuable; even the bad ones”

“Drunkenness is the vice of a good constitution or of a bad memory—of a constitution so treacherously good that it never bends till it breaks; or of a memory that recollects the pleasures of getting intoxicated, but forgets the pains of getting sober.”

“You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.”

“You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.” Sara looked directly into his eyes. “If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.”

“Thinking about one memory tends to activate other memories. …If you are trying to retrieve a particular memory, the flood of memories can cause competition… leaving you with a traffic jam of neural nodes… leaving you with nothing.”

“I want to believe that memories, even sad and painful ones, should not be forgotten forever.”

“You say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it is the good war that sanctifies every cause!”

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”

“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

“A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.”