Speak, Memory Quotes

Among the anomalies of a memory, whose possessor and victim should never have tried to become an autobiographer, the worst is the inclination to equate in retrospect my age with that of the century...

"That's interesting. Now I understand. Everything is water, vsyo—voda." (3.3.4)

Nothing is sweeter or stranger than to ponder those first thrills. They belong to the harmonious world of a perfect childhood and, as such, possess a naturally plastic form in one's memory, which c...

We discovered then that some of her letters had the same tint as mine and that, besides, she was optically affected by musical notes. (2.1.4)

But even so, the individual mystery remains to tantalize the memoirist. Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed u...

The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me. [...] The nostalgia I have been cherishing...

Meanwhile, with a permanent staff of about fifty servants and no questions asked, our city household and country place were the scenes of a fantastic merry-go-round of theft. (2.4.2)

He tried to teach me to find the geometrical coordinations between the slender twigs of a leafless boulevard tree, a system of visual give-and-takes, requiring a precision of linear expression, whi...

I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world th...