Quotes About Memory

When you are old you can look back and see yourself when you are young. It is almost like looking down from heaven. And you see yourself as a young woman, just a big girl really, half awake to the world. You see yourself happy, holding in your arms a good, decent, gentle, beloved young man with the blood keen in his veins, who before long is going to disappear, just disappear, into a storm of hate and flying metal and fire. And you just don't know it.

It was the kind of winter day that makes you forget that the weather was ever any different, and you feel like it has been winter all the way back to Adam.

And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen...our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself...and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds.

It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song.

Back there in the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever. And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time.

All good human work remembers its history.

Also during their honeymoon, Jane shared with him a gift from her favorite professor at Swarthmore, Henry Goddard, chair of the English Department. For every student, Goddard wrote a phrase from literature on a slip of paper, put it inside a walnut shell, and presented it at the end of the semester. For Jane, he had selected a sentence from Dostoyevsky: "One sacred memory from childhood is perhaps the best education." Kurt referred to it for years as inspiration and solace.

TO LIVE IN HEARTS WE LEAVE BEHIND IS NOT TO DIE

He was reminded dully of a scene in The Big Parade years ago (was everything in fiction or in film more real to him than fact?) in which the American troops were shown advancing across a wooded slope into battle: walking slowly doggedly on, their guns in their hands, their grim faces set: plodding straight ahead in a kind of frightful and relentless monotony, undeterred by bursting shrapnel, smoke, gas, tank-fire, or their own dead.… He did not push his way through the crowds.

The Sorrow and the Pity,

his little whirl-about of a head was so full of the notion of going out to see the world, that it forgot her in five minutes: however, though his head forgot her, I am glad to say his heart did not.

Presents, I often say, endear absents.

The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and think about that little red-haired girl... I don't ever want to forget her face, but if I don't forget her face, I'll go crazy... How can I remember the face I can't forget? Suddenly I'm writing country western music!

Today is my grandfather's birthday." "How old is he?" "Sixty-three. It's hard to believe he was once a human being.

That has to be the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to me in my whole life.

Posterity is grateful if our contemporaries are not.

A change in paperwork [birth certificate] can't erase words stamped on the human heart.

Water)... no matter how wide or deep you cut it...it has no memory. No scar... it's all future, no past.

Letting myself experience or desire pleasure is like a shot through the heart of their memory.

She blazed, burned herself out, and then disappeared into the silent deep, sounding the echoes of remembrance throughout a hollow and shattered heart.

shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth, I knew not where; for so swiftly it flew, the sight could not follow in its flight. I breathed a song into the air, it fell to earth I knew not where; for who has sight so keen and strong, that it can follow the flight of a song? Long, long afterward, in an oak, I found the arrow still unbroke, and the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.

That rare person who has 1,073,741,824 bytes of memory will say, "I've got a gig (and I'm not talking music).

Little did Papa realize that morning that he was never to see us or hold us again, nor would he ever again harken to the meadowlarks of Yell County trilling a joyous anthem to spring.