Quotes About Memory

the breeze would draw a violin bow across the branches of a tree and I would again hear her lullaby. I would listen to the chime of coins being counted, and I would imagine her laughter. Her voice was caught in the shell of my ear, as if it were the ocean.

How do you do it? I ask softly, and I'm no longer asking just about her and Josef but about myself as well. How do you get up every morning and not remember?

In my first memory, I am three years old and I am trying to kill my sister.

Nobody's birthday.

You could lose track of someone when you blinked

Something still exists as long as there's someone around to remember it, right?" Lacy

he would see this moment forever—one of life's gallery of pictures—

death had become part of the landscape.

long as someone remembers you, you never really die.

It doesn't matter who forgives you if you're the one who can't forget.

When I was four years old, I kept telling my mother that the little boy in our house was stealing things.

After all, the last thing Kenosi saw, before he closed his eyes forever, was his mother coming back to him.

Some feel that because they lived, it's their responsibility to tell the world what happened, so it won't happen again, and so people won't forget. Others believe that the only way to go on with the rest of their lives is to act as if it never happened.

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

But I remember another image from Earth: the rich dark green grass that grew in graveyards.

he'd done it as an infant.

Only our memories allow that some people ever existed. That they mattered, or mattered too much.

That first loving kiss, the one that comes out of you from the source of your personal river, and the one that comes from her that is the same, there's never another moment like it; never another flame that burns so hot. It can never be that good again, ever. All manner of goodness can come after, but it's different. And that's a good thing, because if we burned that hot for too long, we'd be nothing but ash.

It's like we are in a grand symphony," Dr. Hew Len explained. "Each of us has an instrument to play. I have one, too. Your readers have theirs. None are the same. In order for the concert to play and everyone to enjoy it, they need to play their part and not another's. We get into trouble when we don't pick up our instrument or we think someone has a better one. That's memory.

We are wholly alone in the evening gloom. And my fingers are warm like the lost days of June. — Joseph Brodsky, from "Evening," Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems , trans. George L. Kline (Harper & Row, 1973)

And if it once is so, it is so always; no one can go back, and he whom God has forgotten, is forgotten for ever.

The soul of the newly born baby is marked for life by the pattern of the stars at the moment it comes into the world, unconsciously remembers it, and remains sensitive to the return of configurations of a similar kind.

Thomas Jefferson still survives

I never saw the face of Cobbett...I should not know him if I met him in my porridge dish.