Quotes About Memory

The story that had once singed and flared in her had long since receded, as her habit of silence turned, over the decades, into law. Did she mean to take it to the grave with her, then? Plainly, that was what she was going to do. She was going to take it to the grave. And it would end there. Dust.

My grandmother," Ester said, "wished not to trap her love into taking her. She said a heart is a free thing, and once enslaved will mutiny. She said she wished the Englishman's eyes to see her ever in beauty and joy, and never as something pitiable, for his memory of her was her greatest treasure.

She sat back, lifting away her hand. The ghost of its warmth remained on Aaron's skin.

One out of three." He spoke quietly but with an intensity she instantly feared. "One out of every three Jews in the world. In my country, in Poland, nine out of every ten of us died.

Hace falta estar ciego, tener como metidas en los ojos raspaduras de vidrio, cal viva, arena hirviendo, para no ver la luz que salta en nuestros actos, que ilumina por dentro nuestra lengua, nuestra diaria palabra. Hace falta querer morir sin estela de gloria y alegría, sin participación de los himnos futuros, sin recuerdo en los hombres que juzguen el pasado, sombrío de la Tierra. Hace falta querer ya en vida ser pasado, obstáculo sangriento, cosa muerta, seco olvido.

He lives vividly in her recollections, however, and his memory is etched on her soul.

Dreams that are as rich as cream while they unfold are skim milk when we wake, and in time they wash out of our minds, leaving as little residue as water filtered through cheesecloth.

As I turned to leave the tent, she said, Don't worry. Your own mother wouldn't know you. I said, She never has.

All death matters. Only to the living.

Maybe from now on the bittersweet memory of a child lost would be only the sweet memory of a child loved. And maybe, henceforth, it would not be a memory so heavy that it oppressed the heart.

We are born with the dead: See, they return and bring us with them." —T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Home was the story of what happened there, not the story of where it happened.

our Janice is gone, but you're still here, and your first allegiance should never be to the dead.

There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.

Nowhere can a secret keep Always secret, dark and deep, Half so well as in the past, Buried deep to last, to last. Keep it in your own dark heart. Otherwise the rumors start. After many years have buried Secrets over which you worried, No confidant can then betray All the words you didn't say. Only you can then exhume Secrets safe within the tomb Of memory, of memory, Within the tomb of memory. -The Book of Counted Sorrows

All our yesterdays neatly shelved, time cataloged in drawers: News grows brittle and yellow under the library, in catacombs of paper.

I'd had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.

Once truth was known, it could not be unlearned, nor could it be forgotten, but lay always in the heart, a darkness for which all the years ahead would be spent seeking whatever light could be found to compensate.

tomorrow is a slave to yesterday.

I can't allow myself to be wary of one place merely because it reminds me of another place where I almost died, because just about every place reminds me of another place...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I tend to do that. Any life isn't just one story; it's thousands of them. So when I try to tell one of my own, I sometimes go down an alleyway when I should take the main street, or if the story is fourteen blocks long, I sometimes start on block four and have to backtrack to make sense.

A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young. —Edgar Allan Poe, "Lenore

Maybe the mobile was why, all these years later, he sometimes dreamed that he could fly.

He said, "Sometimes it takes a lot of distance to be able to fold a piece of your life into a work of fiction.