Quotes About Memory

But it was the kind of story that doesn't go away after the first time you tell it so you have to tell it over and over until it goes away for good. If it ever can.

Don't ever forget your history," she sang, "or any wicked soul can lie to you and get away with it.

Michiko Nogami (1946—1982)" Is she more apparent because she is not anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white because she was the color of pale honey? A smokestack making the sky more visible. A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko said, "The roses you gave me kept me awake with the sound of their petals falling.

I keep trying to feel who I was, and cannot. — Jack Gilbert, from "Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina," Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)

Another Grandfather" Every generation tells of how the good world died.

We look up at the stars and they are not there. We see the memory of when they were, once upon a time. And that too is more than enough.

Slenderman can invoke memory loss in all but the most resolute - you could have already had a Slenderman encounter and not remember it.

As the evening sky faded from a salmon color to a sort of flint gray, I thought back to the salmon I caught that morning, and how gray he was, and how I named him Flint.

I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.

Love in the past is a memory. Love in the future is a fantasy. To be really alive, love – or any other experience – must take place in the present.

To be able to forget means sanity.

Nicholson Baker, a man who knows the joys of obsessive research, has already started the division. "Let me tell you," he says, "I remember the old days, the antegoogluvian era. It was O.K.—it wasn't horrible by any means. There were cordless telephones, and people wore comfortable sweaters… . But the haul was haphazard, and it came in slow.

Unfortunately," he said, "we have short memories. Most heroes are forgotten by the next news cycle.

I masturbated at the memory of her skin under mine.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

Afscheid nemen van een geest is definitiever dan afscheid nemen van een geliefde. Zelfs de doden keren weer, maar een geest die, eens bemind, weggaat, keert nooit meer weer.

While words may be altered or censored, the truth endures, even when not properly recorded. Truth can be forgotten, misplaced, or lost, but never annihilated.

You get through bad things - I know, enough bad things have happened to me already. But I don't think getting through one bad time makes it any easier to deal with the next one. If anything, it's worse, because there is happiness to remember.

We're all bits that the war didn't take, Flinty thought, gazing at the stranger's back. But those left behind had a right to know more about the beast who'd chewed their lives and spat the remnants out.

Loss isn't an absence after all. It is a presence. A strong presence right next to me. I look at it. It doesn't look like anything, that's what is so strange. It just fits in.

Loss isn't an absence after all. It is a presence.

I remember watching my grandmother build her fire, the honest kindling, the twisted newspaper, the tiny tower of good black coal. And how, once lit, she'd hold a sheet of newspaper across the fire and say, 'watch it suck, dear'. - An Old Woman's Fire

I wrote the song For A Dancer for a friend of mine who died in a fire. He was in the sauna in a house that burned down, so he had no idea anything was going on. It was very sad.

She left behind her giant M, she's not getting my cabinet" -Toby