“Existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing - not even a memory.”

“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.”

“When people go away they vanish, turn to nothing, stop being. They live only in memories, haunting the imagination.”

“Middle-aged memory [is] an instrument of torture: you reach for the fruit of memory and it vanishes, to appear when you no longer want it.”

“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”