what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells

“I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses.”

― Julio Cortazar 

 

“But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously...”
― Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch