Quotes About Memory

We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we've witnessed of man's inhumanity to man, we simply can't go on. Perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.

she understood as never before that home wasn't a place but rather a place in the heart. In this troubled world, everything was transient except what we could carry with us in our minds and hearts. Every home ceased to be a home sooner or later, but not with its demolition. It survived destruction as long as just one person who had loved it still lived. Home was the story of what happened there, not the story of where it happened.

Readers will easily recognize the cover of a book they've read, but in a cafe that man over there, is that...is that...well, it's hard to tell - doesn't he have long hair? - oh, he's gone.

We've already been killed, all of us. It happened so long ago, we've forgotten it.

Je me suis souvenue des soixante ans de mon père. On avait mangé une choucroute à la République. C'était l'âge qu'avaient les parents. Un âge immense et abstrait. Maintenant c'est toi qui l'as. Comment est-ce possible? Une fille fait les quatre cents coups, se trimbale dans la vie juchée et peinturlurée et tout à coup se met à avoir soixante ans.

Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace.

She was afraid to touch the dictionary — Oki was even there. Innumerable words reminded her of him. To link whatever she saw and heard with her love was nothing less than to be alive. Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace.

When you die, there is nothing--only a life that will be forgotten. -from Gathering Ashes

He could not call up the faces of his own mother and father, who had died three or four years before. He would look at a picture, and there they would be. Perhaps people were progressively harder to paint in the mind as they near one, loved by one. Perhaps clear memories came easily in proportion as they were ugly.

Do you think it's right to not say goodbye to the man you yourself said was on the very first page of your very first volume of your diary? This is the very last page of his.

What seemed strangest to me when I found this diary was that I have no recollection of the day-to-day life it describes. If I do not recall them, where have those days gone? Where had they vanished to? I pondered the things that human beings lose to the past -from Diary of My Sixteenth Year

What I believe to be memories are probably daydreams. Still, my own sentimentality yearns for them as if they were the truth, suspect or twisted though they may be. I have forgotten that they were stories I heard from another and feel an intimacy with them as if they were my own direct memories -from Oil

La conciencia de su propio cuerpo era inseparable del recuerdo de aquel abrazo.

Qué eran, para un hombre de sesenta y siete años junto a una muchacha de una sola noche, la inteligencia, la cultura, la barbarie?

As old age approached, Eguchi would, on nights when he had difficulty sleeping, sometimes remember the woman's words, and count up numbers of women on his fingers; but he did not stop at anything so simple as picturing those he would not mind kissing. He would travel back over memories of women with whom he had had affairs. An old love had come back tonight because the sleeping beauty had given him the illusion that he smelled milk.

Su angustia no era común a todas las mujeres en el acto de la entrega. Y con ella ocurrió solamente en aquella única vez. El hilo de plata estaba cortado, la taza de oro destruida.

Pasaban los años,y la única persona que no cambiaba era la joven de su libro

Esperar a Oki es lo mismo que esperar el pasado… El tiempo y los ríos no corren para atrás.

Con el correr del tiempo, el recuerdo de aquel abrazo se fue purificando dentro de Otoko; fue dejando de ser algo físico para convertirse en algo espiritual. Ahora ella ya no era pura y sin duda Oki tampoco lo era. Y sin embargo, su antiguo abrazo, tal como lo veía ahora, parecía puro. Aquel recuerdo —en el que ella intervenía y no intervenía, que parecía real e irreal— era una visión sagrada, una visión sublimada del abrazo de antaño.

Siempre recordaré que estuve en tus brazos frente a una antigua sepultura, en una mañana como ésta. Es muy extraño que una tumba cree un recuerdo.

As death approaches, memory erodes. Recent memories are the first to succumb. Death works its way backward until it reaches memory's earliest beginnings. Then memory flares up for an instant, just like a flame about to go out. That is the 'prayer in the mother tongue.' -from A Prayer in the Mother Tongue

Eguchi, now sixty-seven, had lost many friends and relations, but the memory of the girl was still young. Reduced now to three details, the baby's white cap and the cleanness of the secret place and the blood on the breast, it was still clear and fresh.

Is it a boy or a girl? It's a girl. Really! Can't you tell by looking at it? Is it mine? It is not. Oh? Well, if it is, you needn't say so now. You can say when you feel like it. Years and years from now. It is not. It really is not. I haven't forgotten that I loved you, but you are not to imagine things.

He could not call up the faces of his own mother and father, who had died three or four years before. He would look at a picture, and there they would be. Perhaps people were progressively harder to paint in the mind as they were near one, loved by one. Perhaps clear memories came easily in proportion as they were ugly.