I record my life, sifting and trying to separate what is real from what I’ve dreamed. I have decided not to tell you what is fact versus what is unfact primarily because (a) I am giving you a portrait of the essence of me, and (b) because, living where I do, living in the chasm that cuts through thought, it is lonely… come with me, reader. I am toying with you, yes, but for a real reason. I am asking you to enter the confusion with me, to give up the ground with me, because sometimes that frightening floaty place is really the truest of all. Kierkegaard says, ‘The greatest lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet. We are most honest when we are lost.’ Enter that lostness with me. Live in the place I am, where the view is murky, where the connecting bridges and orienting maps have been surgically stripped away.
Lauren Slater, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir
Fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.
John Green
Today I finally overcame /
Tryin’ to fit the world inside a picture frame /
John Mayer, 3x5
I haven’t seen you in ages /
sometimes I find myself wondering where you are /
For me, you’ll always be eighteen and beautiful /
And dancing away with my heart /
Lady Antebellum, Dancing Away with my Heart (via justinerawr)

Source: justinerawr

It was like the cornerstone of my childhood, the event upon which I built everything else, and now it’s pulled out and everything is toppled.
Jim True-Frost, Off the Map
I’ve been dumped before, Renee. This isn’t pain I’m feeling, it’s nostalgia.
Calista Flockhart, Ally McBeal
In memory everything seems to happen to music.
Tennessee Williams
Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
If you take a book with you on a journey,…an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it…yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.
Cornelia Funke, Inkheart (via s0nata)

(via s0nata-deactivated20120103)

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.
Susan B. Anthony
The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
Salvador Dali
I knew that there were no guarantees. No way of knowing what came next for me, for him, or anybody. Some things don’t last forever, but some things do. Like a good song, or a good book, or a good memory you can take out and unfold in your darkest times, pressing down the corners and peering in close, hoping you still recognize the person you see there.
Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby
Your memory is a way of holding on to what you are, what you love, and what you never want to lose.
Daniel Stern, The Wonder Years