Quotes About Memory

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth A youth to Fortune and Fame unknown.

At a certain point memory becomes a beach strewn with landmines, all life's many losses buried in those sands.

She seemed to be gathering something from it, my mother's thoughts and memories, as if such things lay like a film of dust upon the objects we left behind.

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

We two kept house, the Past and I,The Past and I;Through all my tasks it hovered nigh,Leaving me never alone.

I am the family face flesh perishes, I live on.

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,Saying that now you are not as you wereWhen you had changed from the one who was all to me,But as at first, when our day was fair.

If I saw you everyday forever, I would remember this time.

Friends depart, and memory takes them To her caverns, pure and deep.

I remember, I rememberThe house where I was born,The little window where the sunCame peeping in at morn.

Speeches that are measured by the hour will die with the hour.

Years later, one woman from those lines, remembering the morning, would face a German television crew and attempt to explain it. "He was our father, he was our mother, he was our only faith. He never let us down.

There was no particular reason for the Canadian government to remember what had happened to the Cherokee in the 1840s. After all, most governments can't remember the promises that got them elected.

Most of us think that history is the past. It's not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That's all it is. Stories. Such a definition might make the enterprise of history seem neutral. Benign.

Most of us think that history is the past. It's not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That's all it is.

History is the stories we tell about the past.

But now, in the daily business of our warped cosmos, Vulcan barley registers, even as an antiquarian curiosity. Only a few have some vague memory of the story – mostly physicists and astronomers with a historical bent. For them, Vulcan is a cautionary tale: it's so damn easy to see what one wants or expects to find.

Is the child in that old photograph really an erstwhile version of you, your little hand waving farewell? The face of that child is nothing like the face you have now. That child's face is now melding with the blackness behind you, before you, around you. The child is waving and smiling and fading as your car keeps skidding toward your abruptly curtailed future. Bye-bye.

Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence.

Only after everyone who ever remembered you is gone for good and all does the terrible insanity that once bore your name achieve a true oblivion. Good-bye.

Cuando enterramos a los viejos, enterramos el pasado conocido, el pasado que a veces imaginamos mejor de lo que fue, pero el pasado al fin y al cabo, habitado en parte por nosotros. El recuerdo es el tema inevitable, el consuelo final. Pero cuando enterramos recién nacidos, enterramos el futuro, inmanejable y desconocido, lleno de promesas y posibilidades, de logros teñidos de esperanzas color de rosa.

There's no easy way to do this. So do it right: weep, laugh, watch, pray, love, live, give thanks and praise; comfort, mend, honor, and remember.

I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.

The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents. It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honor.