Quotes About Memory

I scroll through iPhone photos and see that if I delete pictures of myself with a double chin, I will erase all proof of my glorious life.

Suddenly a frenzied high-pitched shriek behind us. Henry Klein, a stocky survivor from Dniepa, had burst into wild, piercing sobs. Turning away from us, he began to howl Kaddish, his voice shrill. His children stood by, stunned. He was doubled over now, hands on

I remembered only the good and loveable things about him, not the wretchedness he caused me, and the dope, and the resentments and silence and the half-crazy outbursts. I remembered his smell and the colour of his eyes and his head thrown back to laugh; these things were a second away, in time, but the others I dredged up dutifully, knowing that I must, for the sake of truth and sanity, try to keep a balance.

the past that has not passed away

this was a "dirty war" and it "disappeared" some 30,000 people during the war of 1936–39.

there are some striking similarities with the post-Soviet experience where a heterogeneously configured and relatively marginal civic memory movement also struggles against a state that neither properly recognizes, still less commemorates the unlawfully murdered.3

As early as 1977, the now iconic comic strip Paracuellos appeared. It was provocatively named – for Paracuellos, the village outside Madrid where the Republicans shot over two thousand prisoners during the wartime siege of the capital,12 lay at the heart of regime martyrology.

recuperative and commemorative work.

historical memory law of 2007

long, slow and painful recuperation of Republican history and memory

the tens of thousands of people killed in the Francoist repression – by the end of the 1940s the figure was at least 150,000

Time--our youth--it never really goes, does it It is all held in our minds.

The truth is that you do forget people. When you conjure them up, long after they have gone, you can't recall the essence of them, just the outline.

Forgetting takes practice…You have to work at it.

When love is at its best, one loves so much that he cannot forget.

One's life story cannot be told with complete veracity. A true autobiography would have to be written in states of mind, emotions, heartbeats, smiles and tears not in months and years, or physical events. Life is marked off on the soul by feelings, not by dates.

We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.

We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.

I can't, even now, arrange it in the right order. The memories are like heavy blocks of glass. I can put them down in different places but they don't make a story.

so that new things I encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past.

That I have remembered what it is, and how it can be done. But watching television from the sofa later that evening I notice tears running from my eyes and dropping into my mug of tea. Odd, I think. I put it down to tiredness. Perhaps I am getting a cold. Perhaps

We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost.

Time didn't run forwards any more. It was a solid thing you could press yourself against and feel it push back; a thick fluid, half-air, half-glass, that flowed both ways and sent ripples of recollection forwards and new events backwards

Memory and love and magic. What happened over the years of my expeditions as a child was a slow transformation of my landscape over time into what naturalists call a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning.