Quotes About Memory

Talking about the old days made Kate anything but nostalgic; actually, despite what everybody said about youth, most of her past made her shudder, in sheer disgust and in relief that she didn't have to live it over again.

There are some things that don't change much. I find the smell of a dish, or the way a certain spice is crushed, or just a quick look at the way something has been put on a plate, can pull me back to another place and time. I love those memories that seem so far away, yet you can hold them and carry them with you, even forget them, and then, with a single taste or hint or a smell, be chaperoned back to a beautiful moment.

A fé lhe ensina aquilo que lhe cumpre fazer. A memória lhe mostra aonde vão parar todas estas coisas, trazendo-lhe presente à lembrança a morte daqueles que ela viu desfrutar dessas frivolidades, e como algumas foram súbitas e quão depressa foram esquecidas por todos;

Everything passes—Robust artAlone is eternal.The bustSurvives the city.

No one is truly dead until they are no longer loved.

Haven't slept in so long my memory foam is starting to forget.

I made it a point to think of them to keep them alive in my heart.

There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.

Ja, Erinnerung ist viel, ist alles. Und die hab ich nun und bleibt mir und kann mir nicht mehr genommen werden. Und ich fühle ordentlich, wie mir dabei leicht zumute wird.

Cuando lo concreto se pierde, es reemplazado por los clichés. Por eso debemos dar nuestros testimonios. Por cada recuerdo que se pierde llega un tópico en su lugar. El mundo del cliché es un mundo con amnesia.

She was] a strange butterfly which had flown across his garden and which his eyes had continued to follow long after it had disappeared from sight.

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.

Ob ein Mensch Erfahrungen machen kann oder nicht, ist in letzter Instanz davon abhängig, wie er vergisst.

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

Like ghosts, past failures haunt us.

The object of such historiography is to disconnect everyone from a real sense of a living past and a living culture.

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils,And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile.

My Papa's Waltz: The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.

Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.

We are nothing if we are not the sum total of our physique and the history of the actions of our physique--that we carry with us in body and in memory. (Body - Michael McClure)

Everything that is remembered about the past is washed, and often drowned, in nostalgia, pride, illusions and passions of all kinds.