"I had forgotten everything.  The same system that created my thoughts took charge of erasing them, turning them into sinuous white strips that reached across every level.  How can there be so much amnesia in a single lifetime?  Isn't this a point in favor of the theory of reincarnation?" —César Aira (as translated by Katherine Silver), The Literary Conference

If we are to "remember not past years," we are left to remember the future.  We find this good advice in Lead, Kindly Light by John Henry Newman and illustrated by Frank Dadd, 1887.

"But Memory came and took the glass of Time," from Seen in Three Days, written and illustrated by Edwin John Ellis, 1893.

"Lucy gave way for a short time to the memory pictures which floated before her mental vision," from Thrilling Life Stories for the Masses, 1892.

We like this as-is scan from the British Library as a visual poem.  The text reads, "were unable to discover to whose memory it."  From An Aide-de-Camp's Recollections of Service in China by Arthur Augustus Thurlow Cunynghame, 1844.

The bliss of oblivion and the phantom, burden, and chain of memory—these are two sides of the same thing, two dimensions of the conditio humana.

"The pace of time depends on how it was lived; the present is black and white while the memory is blue."
—Gian Enzo Sperone: Torino-Roma-New York, 2000.

[For Jeff.]

"Is it the dead who bring our memories back to life when they want us to feel their presence?  Do they cross the stream of time to reach us by turning back the clock within us?"
—Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican

"Don't be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present.   Beware of the most honest broker.  Remember that what you are told is really threefold:  shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale." —Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

"Memory has its own special kind.  It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own."
—Salman Rushdie

"Memories that come back to life are like ghosts; they emerge, as if from a tiny point, then swell until they suddenly take on a spatial presence of greater beauty and immediacy than they ever had before."
—Gustav Meyrink, Walpurgisnacht

"I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past." —Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

"We are more viably memories than we are humans ... we are more persistently records we leave behind than we are bodies that move through space." —Geof Huth

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"To recall with a memory that is not our own is ... a perfect metaphor for literary experience."
—Enrique Vila-Matas, Montano's Malady