Quotes About Memory

We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?

Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free. His ashes settle among mine, and I feel nothing.

Will I feel his ashes as they fall against mine?

But I would have the memory be worthy of the man.

Somewhere his soul waits, but it is nowhere I can reach. Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free.

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... We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows? Perhaps one day I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you... We are men only. A brief flare of the torch. Those to come may raise us or lower us as they please.

The voices of the dead were said to have the power to make the living mad.

There is this, too." His hand was ceaseless now. "I know I have told you of this." I closed my eyes. "Tell me again," I said.

I can smell him. The oils that he uses on his feet, pomegranate and sandalwood; the salt of clean sweat; the hyacinths we had walked through, their scent crushed against our ankles. Beneath it all is his own smell, the one I go to sleep with, the one I wake up to.

The yearning for him is like hunger, hollowing me. Somewhere his soul waits, but it is nowhere I can reach. Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free. His ashes settle among mine, and I feel nothing.

A pleasure rose in me so old and sharp it felt like pain.

You chose her," he says. "Over me." "Over your pride." "My life is my reputation. It is all I have. I will not live much longer. Memory is all I can hope for. You know this. And you would let Agamemnon destroy it? Would you help him take it from me?

Memories were built of air, and blew away.

Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.

summertime." "I remember it well.

Then she would be that hostess in Houston and I would be that tanned one from Florida, a small memory of chlorinated pool water, fruit juice and gin, steak raw in the middle, and hearty rhythms in the draperied twilight of the tomb-cool motel cubicle, riding the grounded flesh of the jet-stream Valkyrie. A harmless pleasure. For harmless plastic people, scruff-proof, who can create the delusion of romance.

The eye records. The eye takes vivid, unforgettable pictures.

All the bright people, stopped in the midst of life, looking with forced smile into the lenses, then to be filed away, their colors fading as the years pass, caught there in slide trays, stack loads, view cubes, until one day the camera person dies and the grandchild says, "Mom, I don't know any of these people. Or where these were taken even. There are jillions of them here in this big box and more in the closet. What will I do with them anyway?" "Throw them out, dear.

Death is an unending rerun until the last person with any memory of you is also dead.

How paltry are the traces left behind by a life, even one concentrated around those supposed things of permanence called words. We spend our time upon the earth and then disappear, and only one one-thousandth of what we were lasts. We send all those bottles out into the ocean and so few wash up on shore.

Souvent Me Souvient (Remember Me Often)-The Darwin Conspiracy

Memory relates to ethics as well as to spirituality (the distinction between ethics and spirituality is a Western one and does more harm than good). Memory places obligations upon you. The Israelites were to remember their experience of servitude in Egypt, and treat their servants accordingly.

The nature of the praise and prayer in the Psalms indicates how memory is key to praise and prayer.

The problem with nostalgia is what we tend to do is only remember what you like and you forget the parts you didn't like