Quotes About Memory

Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.

And I survived because I made a point of forgetting.

I don't know if I saw blood before turning into Mother's arms or if I daubed it on later, in my memory, with a brush (Life of Pi 36)

The sound would disappear, but the hurt would linger, like the smell of piss long after it has evaporated.

That bungled goodbye hurts me to this day.

Mamaji remembered, Father dreamed.

On a day when I estimated it was my mothers birthday, I sang 'Happy Birthday' to her out loud.

For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.

Things that are not at all, are never lost.

Make me immortal with a kiss.

Todos necesitamos espejos para recordarnos a nosotros mismos quienes somos. Yo no soy diferente - Memento

Tengo que creer en un mundo que existe fuera de mi cabeza; creer que mis actos tienen algun significado aunque yo no los recuerde; tengo que creer que cuando mis ojos están cerrados el mundo sigue ahí.

Tú no buscas la verdad. Tú fabricas tu propia verdad. - Memento

People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn't.

It's amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this books survives, his ideas live.

Some loves have to be given up, others have to be forgotten. Strange as it may sound, if you think of me as a monster, but I can love most passionately. I do not think of myself as evil.

I closed my eyes softly and fell in love with the way I remembered you: body, soul, and all.

As we grow we do not see ourselves changing – there is the apparent continuity of the mirror, the daily awareness of immediate past – and it takes the reminders of old photographs or old friends to point out the differences.

History is not a conversation with the past, Instead, in Warburg, memory is carried forward to us, objectively, by the sequence of pathos-formulas. We do not choose our past, it chooses us. This was not an entirely direful story. The pathos-formulas register danger but they also ward it off, apotropaically. Art creates the psychic distance that gives mankind a chance in its struggle with hostile nature or with the gods.

The number of the Jews murdered in a beastly fashion in the Wilno [Vilna] area and in Lithuania is put at 300,000.

Everything is 'smart' now. The library cataloging system is smart, classification and indexing information entered into a uniform online database. People wept and lamented the loss of the old cards, then forgot them. They pretty much forget everything they weep over and lament. Clop-clop of hooves on the street. The humble art of carrying a block of ice up the stairs, pincered by a pair of tongs. Rotary phones and 33 rpm records. Stamp-pad ink and poster paint.

God's camera takes snapshots that don't fall into your hand like Polaroids do. They pop right into your head and stay there forever.