Quotes About Memory

She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.

Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.

Esme is thinking about the hard thing. The difficult one. She does this only rarely. But sometimes she gets the urge and today is one of those days when she seems to see Hugo. In the corner of her eye, a small shape crawling through the shadow in the lee of a door, the space beneath the bed. Or she can hear the pitch of his voice in a chair scraped across the floor. There's no knowing how he might choose to be with her.

Children's] lives start long before birth, long before conception, and if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialise at all, they become ghosts in our lives . . . The unborn, whether they're named or not, whether or not they're acknowledged, have a way of insisting: a way of making their presence felt.

Maggie O'Farrell

Her mother may, this very moment, be calling her to that place from which people never return.

a girl comes to crouch in front of me and I see that she is unlacing my shoes and taking them off and I say to her, I took it, I took it, and I've never told anyone. The girl looks up at me and she titters. You tell us every day, she says. I know she is lying so I say, it was my sister's, you know. And she just turns to speak to someone over her shoulder and—

And she holds the photograph. She holds it in her hands. She looks at it and she knows.

And now she must give up this body, submit it to the earth, never to be seen again.

I think about the person I was in my mid 20's. I consider her. I try to recall how it felt to be that age. What were the frameworks of her days? The patterns of her thoughts? I am as far from her now as she was from her childhood. She is the median line between me and my birth.

One thousand ways to say good-bye One thousands ways to cry One thousand ways to hang your hat before you go outside I say good-bye good-bye good-bye I shout it out so loud Cause the next time that I find my voice I might not remember how.

right in this moment, I can´t even remember what unhappy feels like.

You're like a song that I heard when I was a little kid but forgot I knew until I heard it again.

Memories are like layers of your skin or layers of paint on a canvas.

Atrocity cannot be its own explanation. Violence cannot be allowed to speak for itself, for violence is not its own meaning. To be made thinkable it needs to be historicized.

No night is long enough for us to dream twice.

Out of my ignorance, I called you a homeland and I forgot homelands are taken away.

I prepare my portrait for my woman to hang on a wall when I die. she says: Is there a wall to hang it on? I say: We'll build a room for it. Where? In any house.

I testify that I am free and alive when I am forgotten

Do not be absent for too long, then come and ask about how I am, details die with time and stories change.

After you nothing goes and nothing returns.

All roads lead to you, even those I took to forget you.

Later, we'll look up what was recorded in our history about yours in faraway lands. Then we'll ask ourselves, "Was Andalusia here or there? On earth, or only in poems?

Do not be absent for too long, then come and ask about how am, details die with time and stories change.