Quotes About Memory

Non esiste il passato, ma solo il presente del passato (che poi si chiama «memoria»). Non esiste il futuro, ma solo il presente del futuro (che poi si chiama «speranza»). L'unico

From 'Periodic Table of Elements': A girl ago, a girlhood gone like a phial of ether | Thrown on fire--just | A little jump of flame, like grief, or | Like a penicillin that has lost its skill at killing | Off, it then is gone.

I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost.

they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine

oh antic God return to me my mother in her thirties leaned across the front porch the huge pillow of her breasts pressing against the rail summoning me in for bed. I am almost the dead woman's age times two. I can barely recall her song the scent of her hands though her wild hair scratches my dreams at night. return to me, oh Lord of then and now, my mother's calling, her young voice humming my name.

the st. marys river flows as if nothing has happened i watch it with my coffee afraid and sad as are we all so many ones to hate and i cursed with long memory cursed with the desire to understand have never been good at hating

I am accused of tending to the past as if I made it, as if I sculpted it with my own hands. i did not, this past was waiting for me when I came,

Not lost, but gone before.

The effort mined a core of dizziness inside him. He resisted it, but then realizing that there was nothing attractive about consciousness, nothing he cared to know about the someone in charge of death and butterflies, he let himself go spiraling down past layers of darkness and shining wings, darkness and mystical light, and a memory of pain so bright that it became a white darkness wherein he lost all track of being.

One of my cats reminds me of my mother. I pat my mother in her. Reincarnation of evaporated mother.

stirred to action, and he was minded to make amends to the memory of her who had done so much for him. At his instigation Isabeau carried her daughter's appeal to Rome.

Remember me a little while, Pause in the orchard where we often walked, When days were longer and the world was ours. Say, "Cara, please!" one last time, and smile. From beneath the apple tree, Glance up to where I once looked down at you. Wear, just once more, The look that said I was your love, And you were mine until my end. I knew it all the while. Miss me, but not for long. I was your joy, Don't let me be your woe, So remember me, and smile. Then let me go.

She can raise from the tomb those of whom she speaks or writes, and make them live forever.

Her hair is longer now, and fine lines bracket her mouth, parentheses around a lifetime of words I was not around to hear.

Chicken,' Josie said. 'Have you ever been in love?' Peter looked at Josie, and thought of how they had once tied a note with their addresses to a helium balloon and let it go in her backyard, certain it would reach Mars. Instead, they had received a letter from a widow who lived two blocks away. 'Yeah,' he said. 'I think so.

Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank.

As she gets sicker, she fades a little more, until I am afraid one day I will wake up and not be able to see her at all.

For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years.

It's amazing how easily someone can leave your life. It's standing on a beach and stepping back to see the hole of your footprint subsumed by the sand and the sea as if it were never there. Grief, it turns out, is a lot like a one-sided video conversation on an iPad. It's the call with no response, the echo of affection, the shadow cast by love. But just because you can't see it anymore doesn't make it any less real.

I remember everything Campbell, she interrupts. If I didn't, this wouldn't be so hard.

But memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

Something still exists as long as there's someone still around to remember it.

Las cosas existen mientras haya quien que las recuerde.

You see, Minka, my father would say. Anything is possible. Even the most terrible beast might one day be a distant memory. He would hold my hand in his, tracing my finger along the brightest stars in the constellation. Look, he would say. There is the head, and the tail. There's the heart.