Quotes About Memory

Our time is certainly out of joint. We have forgotten history for one reason and, if we are not careful, we will neglect it for another. We will have to repair our own sense of time if we wish to renew our commitment to liberty.

Timothy Snyder

Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan "America First." It is those who were considered exceptional, eccentric, or even insane in their own time—those who did not change when the world around them did—whom we remember and admire today.

Will we in retrospect see the elections of 2016 much as Russians see the elections of 1990, or Czechs the elections of 1946, or Germans the elections of 1932? This,

Here, perhaps, is a purpose for history, somewhere between the record of death and its constant reinterpretation. Only a history of mass killing can unite the numbers and the memories. Without history, the memories become private, which today means national; and the numbers become public, which is to say an instrument in the international competition for martyrdom.

To be enlisted posthumously into competing national memories, bolstered by the numbers of which your life has become a part, is to sacrifice individuality. It is to be abandoned by history, which begins from the assumption that each person is irreducible.

When we think of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, we imagine Auschwitz and mechanized impersonal death. This was a convenient way for Germans to remember the Holocaust, since they could claim that few of them had known exactly what had happened behind those gates. In fact, the Holocaust began not in the death facilities, but over shooting pits in eastern Europe.

Germans carried out what they called the "Great Action," deporting some 265,040 Jews to the death factory at Treblinka to be

When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action.

The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler...this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar.

The Jewish barbers, who cut the hair of thousands of women, remembered the beautiful ones.

Cultures of memory are organized by round numbers, intervals of ten; but somehow the remembrance of the dead is easier when the numbers are not round, when the final digit is not a zero. So within the Holocaust, it is perhaps easier to think of 780,863 different people at Treblinka: where the three at the end might be Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung together after they were gassed,

I remember wishing the moment would hold forever; that we could be fixed there, laughing and irredescent... Then I got panicky because I knew it would pass; that it was passing already.

Forget me, but don't forget my name.

Things become bearers of memory and information, especially when enhanced by stories that expand their capacity to carry meaning.

Without Ruth, there would be no record.

This impulse to preserve past knowledge by hitching narrative explanation to items exhibits what Ulrich calls the 'mnemonic power of goods.' Things become bearers of memory and information, especially when enhanced by stories that expand their capacity to carry meaning.

C'è uno che dice, non so, "siamo andati a prscrxw, e poi lì abbiamo preso il treno per...", e io ti chiedo "Cos'ha detto?", e tu "E poi lì abbiamo preso il treno per Boston". "Ma no! Siamo andati a..?" e tu "EH, APPUNTO! E poi lì abbiamo preso il treno per Boston!" E se non è una cassetta che si può tornare indietro a risentirla IO NON SAPRO' MAI DOVE CAZZODIBUDDA SONO ANDATI!

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

The bullet is already in the brain; it won't be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet's tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce.

I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.

I am haunted by every person I have ever loved.

I'm going to hold you forever, until time doesn't matter, until we are nothing but dust, until the earth, the sun, the moon are gone and there is no memory of us. I will still hold you.

11. Why did seeing my name written out by her make me feel like that was the first time I'd ever seen my name in my whole life?