Memory believes before knowing remembers.
--William Faulkner,
Light in August

For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart. [...]A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds. He consults them instinctively as he wakes and reads in a second the point on the earth he occupies, the time that has elapsed before his waking; but their ranks can be mixed up, broken. [...] There are optical errors in time as there are in space [...] As there is a geometry in space, so there is a psychology in time, in which the calculations of a plane psychology would no longer be accurate because we should not be taking into account time and one of the forms that it assumes, oblivion. [...] Love is space and time measured by the heart.
--Marcel Proust,In Search of Lost Time

I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stronger it becomes. [...] An image depends on the power of association, and association is supplied and prompted by memory. When we speak of a vivid individual recollection we are paying a compliment not to our capacity of retention but to Mnemosyne's mysterious foresight in having stored up this or that element which creative imagination may want to use when combining it with later recollections and inventions. In this sense, both memory and imagination are a negation of time.
--Vladimir Nabokov
Strong Opinions

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient--at others, so bewildered and so weak--and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control!--We are to be sure a miracle in every way--but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.
--Jane Austen
Mansfield Park

I'm afraid...I'm afraid...My mind is going...I can feel it...I can feel it...My mind is going...I can feel it...There is no question about it...I can feel it...I can feel it...I can feel it ...I'm a...fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd liek to hear it I can sing it for you.
--HAL 9000
2001: A Space Odyssey

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun
There is no pain, you are receding.
--Pink Floyd
"Shine On You Crazy Diamond / Part IV" and "Comfortably Numb"

Part I Epigraphs

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
--Louise Glück,
"Nostos"

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.
--Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse-Five

I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.
--David Lynch,Lost Highway

He had no coherent memory for ecstasy or pain, but an acute experience of either was a sudden revelation of the sum of his memory. The present seemed like some modest, lighted table at which four people played Russian bank, but beyond them was some dark cavernous backstage, hung with sandbags and the scenery for yesterday's garden and tomorrow's forest. The present claimed to be supreme, but the truth seemed to lie somewhere between the lighted card table and the cavernous wilderness.
--John Cheever,
Journals

Art consists of the persistence of memory. Because writers remember everything. Especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels, not amnesia. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the real requirement is that ability to remember the story of every scar.
--Stephen King,
Misery

We can't always tell the whole story about ourselves. The Past just left. Its remnants, I claim, are mostly fiction.
--Denis Johnson,
Tree of Smoke and "Doppelgänger, Poltergeist"