Quotes About Memory

I asked Mom why she thought that was, and she pointed out that joy is a product not of whether characters live or die but of what they've realized and achieved, or how they are remembered.

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

Of all persons living, he who does not remember that he has once been young, is the most completely disqualified for giving youthful counsel.

No funeral gloom, my dears, when I am gone, Corpse-gazing, tears, black raiment, graveyard grimness; Think of me as withdrawn into the dimness, Yours still, you mine; remember all the best Of our past moments, and forget the rest.

my ianfu sisters who had died in the comfort station.

I remember your name perfectly, but I just can't think of your face.

In its greatest moments, memory seems to desert human beings ; only tiny ordinary events leave clear detailed trace. Probably none at the pitch of exaltation which Charles and his men had reached had any remembrance of what happened; we can be supermen only on condition of going into a trance. The result alone is related

They lived autobiographies

You think it begins to diminish with time, the pain, then it comes back and hits you with a rawness and freshness you had forgotten.

Things said or done long years ago,Or things I did not do or sayBut thought that I might say or do,Weigh me down, and not a dayBut something is recalled,My conscience or my vanity appalled.

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.

The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.

It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of. [from "The Circus Animals' Desertion"]

The living can assist the imagination of the dead...

When I had laid it on the floor I went to blow the fire a-flame, But something rustled on the floor, And someone called me by my name: It had become a glimmering girl With apple blossoms in her hair Who called me by my name and ran And faded through the brightening air. . . .

One had a lovely face, And two or three had charm, But charm and face were in vain Because the mountain grass Cannot but keep the form Where the mountain hare has lain. - Memory

I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made...

[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.

I did J.E.S.T. here when I was with the First

Toil for the brave! The brave that are no more.

What peaceful hours I once enjoy'd!How sweet their memory still!But they have left an aching voidThe world can never fill.

Killing was a relatively simple matter--a blow to the head, a knife to the throat--complicated only by how much one cared about the pain or terrors animals felt in dying.... The animal also died a second death. Severed from the form in which it had lived, severed from the act that had killed it, it vanished from human memory as one of nature's creatures.