Quotes About Memory

Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs.

Kossula was no longer on the porch with me. He was squatting about that fire in Dahomey. His face was twitching in abysmal pain. It was a horror mask. He had forgotten that I was there. He was thinking aloud and gazing into the dead faces in the smoke. His agony was so acute that he became inarticulate. He never noticed my preparation to leave him. So I slipped away as quietly as possible and left him with his smoke pictures.

They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye.

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

Years ago, she had told her girl self to wait for her in the looking glass. It had been a long time since she had remembered. Perhaps she'd better look. She went over to the dresser and looked hard at her skin and features. The young girl was gone, but a handsome woman had taken her place.

Pheoby's hungry listening helped Janie to tell her story. So she went on thinking back to her young years and explaining them to her friend in soft, easy phrases while all around the house, the night time put on flesh and blackness.

They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance.

Time makes everything old so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked.

The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky.

Funny thing, he said sitting in Zeke's kitchen with his wife, things dat happened long time uhgo used to seem way off, but now it all seems lak it wuz yistiddy. You think it's dead but de past ain't stopped breathin' yet.

The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.

In some ways, I've been left with this great 'idolic' image of my father, but there's a sense of absence, too. You miss his advice and, also, his getting to know the person I have become.

I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time.

Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India.

When I was very little, I had an Essex accent.

I can't do an accent unless I'm on the set. I forget how to do it until I'm on the set.

I've acted for as long as I can remember, really.

I feel like her personality lives through me. How she was and how she acted lives through me. I smile when people say, 'Your mom used to do that; you're thinking just like your mom.'

I'm a big admirer of S21, and I really also like Rithy Panh's work in general.

I was a good boy in high school , and I read for English class, and I vaguely remember reading, as a kid, 'Choose Your Own Adventure' stuff, but I didn't really read for pleasure.

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.

All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.

I realized I've spent all my life creating a past.

Like all things, cities must change - even a city as enamoured of the past and memory as D.C.