Quotes About Memory

Naturally, both sides of the family seemed utterly normal to me at the time but a great deal less so in retrospect.

Out the kitchen window, in the cool autumn breeze between where I sat and our family burial ground, I felt for an instant I could see time moving in the air. I knew I was being foolish but it struck me as odd that time never went backward except in the fragile structure of memory.

I caught myself being drawn ceaselessly back into a past that I wished mightily to emerge from -- I had come to know only recently that one *could* emerge without forgetting, and that to remember need not be to suffocate.

It's so eternal. As long as there are people, they can remember words and combinations of words. Nothing else can survive a holocaust, but poetry and songs.

I'll never look into your eyes again

O que lembro, tenho.

And, just as he had wished, none of us had ever forgotten the maxim which, he remembered, he had bequeathed us. Indeed, the fine Latin maxim "Even if all others do—I do not!" belonged to every truly free life.

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

from On Keeping a Notebook]: It is a good idea to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about…I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not…Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.

I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

She hoped that although he could not hear her she could somehow imprint her ordinary love upon his memory through all eternity, hoped he would rise thinking of her, we were each other, we were each other, not that it mattered much in the long run but what else mattered as much.

Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.

She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.

Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution… In theory, these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.

In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

We all remember what we need to remember.