Quotes About Memory

On June 9, 1942, R?žena Spieglová was one of a group of Czechoslovak Jews sent by rail transport to the Nazi concentration camp in Terezín. On June 12, they were transported farther east to a destination we do not know for sure, probably a forested area in occupied Poland. There were no survivors from that transport. My maternal grandmother was fifty-four years old when she was murdered.

It's foolhardy to think that a story ends

The concerto's beauty was even more impassioned than he remembered, and also more piteous and quiet and restrained, and he clasped his hands together to absorb both the grief and joy in his body.

What happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change?

In the end, I believe these pages and the Book of Records return to the persistence of this desire: to know the times in which we are alive. To keep the record that must be kept and also, finally, to let it go.

And suddenly I was in the car with my father. I heard rain splashing up over the tires and my father, humming. He was so alive, so beloved, that the incomprehensibility of his suicide grieved me all over again. By then, my father had been dead for two decades, and such a pure memory of him had never come back to me.

After surgery, he told his doctors that the pain was exactly as it was, but he did not feel it as greatly. "It's as if," he had said, a cool blandness in his eyes, "the pain is not being done to me." One day, maybe in a ten years, or fifty years, a surgeon will be able to do this with disturbing precision, destroy a whirlpool of memory, an entire system of feelings, but in the meantime it's like taking a hatchet to a spider's web.

She told me I possessed what every great mathematician required, an excellent memory and a sense of poetry. I felt she saw into me, past every façade and flourish, and that the more she knew me, the more she loved me. I was too young, then, to know how lasting this kind of love is, how rarely it comes into one's life, how difficult it is to accept oneself, let alone another. I carried this security--Ai-ming's love, the love of an older sister--out of my childhood and into my adult life.

She says that she held on to the memory as if it were a touchstone, something that could anchor her. She knows, has always believed, that there is a secret that has coloured her life, her childhood. In the last few months, she has felt as if, day by day, she is losing her footing. There are fissures, openings, that she no longer knows how to cover over.

But Sparrow remembered every word as if the brief letter was a poem or Bach partita. He could stand up and deliver it now, word for word, note for note.

Five years of hard labour, Sparrow always reminded her, watching people who had done no wrong disappear, could not be wiped away so quickly, yet still Zhuli wanted to shake her mother, drag her mind back from the camps and make her present. What mattered was the here and now and not the life before, what mattered were the changeable things of today and tomorrow and not the ever, infinitely, unbearably unchanging yesterday.

When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.

Odysseus inclines his head. "True. But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another." He spread his broad hands. "We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?" He smiles. "Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.

Patroclus, he says, Patroclus. Patroclus. Over and over until it is sound only.

It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after.

Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free.

What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory… We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.

If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth. As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong. "Patroclus," he said. He was always better with words than I.

I did not plan to live after he was gone.

We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory.

I remembered what Odysseus had said about her once. That she never went astray, never made an error. I had been jealous then. Now I thought: what a burden. What an ugly weight upon your back.

Some walked hand in hand with those they had loved in life; some waited, secure that one day their beloved would come. And for those who had not loved, whose lives had been filled with pain and horror, there was the black river Lethe, where one might drink and forget. Some consolation.

He smiled at me, and I saw the lines where other smiles had been.

We are men only, a brief flare of the torch. Those to come may raise us or lower us as they please.