Quotes About Memory

Weil Gottes Wort in der Geschichte und das heißt in der Vergangenheit zu uns gesprochen hat, darum ist die Erinnerung, die Wiederholung des Gelernten täglich nötige Übung.

No one forgets his pain, that's a lie. It's buried there in memory and remains in you forever.

Porque la historia es la memoria colectiva de la humanidad, es el análisis del desarrollo de los hombres en sociedad; y eso no puede reducirse a la acción de un solo hombre, por influyente que haya sido

Not what it could have been: It is what it was. And what it was is dead. Octavio Paz, Lesson of Things, 1955

la cara linda y alegre del muchacho en el recuerdo de la sirvientita y me digo yo: ¿qué es lo que la hace linda a una cara?, ¿por qué dan tantas ganas de acariciarla a una cara linda?

Una mañana mi madre me dio un pedazo de pan que parecía recién hecho o quizá lo imagino recién hecho y un puñado de aceitunas negras, muy sabrosas, de esas aceitunas arrugadas que se llaman de Aragón. Recuerdo aquellos sabores, la alegría de mi libertad en la calle. La mirada protectora de mi madre. Si pudiera volver a aquella mañana.

Todos los muertos vuelven si los llama el amante con la fuerza necesaria.

Durante la infancia yo confundía estos parajes terrenales con los pliegues de mi propio cerebro y desde aquellos días de inocencia no me ha abandonado la idea de que la vida de los hombres no es sino un nudo de aromas que se va deshaciendo ante la muerte.

Es difícil librarte de tu pasado.

We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful.

Nor did I ever forget the distress signals which my adolescent self sent out to the older woman who was afterward to absorb me, body and soul. Nothing, I feared, would survive of that girl, not so much as a pinch of ashes. I begged her successor to recall my youthful ghost, one day, from the limbo to which it had been consigned.

the mention of age is only a reference point in the observation of the self.

The writing of autobiography or memoir is comparable to the effect of time on ruins: it works by means of subtraction and selection.

a relationship with time that removes all relevance from the distinction between memory and forgetting, something like a rediscovery or, as in the case of the ritual when it is successful, a renewal.

thus frame the evocation of a nonlinear time in which the after can be richer and more precise than the before, a time that remains in the face of time that passes, a time that provides pleasure and happiness.

something that locates them at a distance from aging and the passing time:

The ages of life can be evoked independently from the progression that advancing age implies, by means of anticipation, which lays out a future, or memory, which recreates the past, and in any case, by letting the imagination play with time.

the other and the past coexisted there from the beginning),

Nostalgia or the height of bad faith: when its target is time, it performs a ruthless selection; forgetfulness is its secret and particularly effective weapon, a sharp knife that cuts ever deeper into the layers of memory and invents a past that never existed.

we know perfectly well that all was not paradise at the time of our earliest loves; what we wish for, even in knowing the vanity of this wish, is to return there now with our emptiness, our desires, and our imagination.

tell me how you age, and I will tell you what you were.

No beach today!" D.W. announced the next morning. "I had a dream about Buster," said Arthur. "Why don't you write him a postcard?" Mother suggested. "Why don't we all write postcards?" said Father. "But what do we write about?" said D.W. "We haven't done anything yet!

Dear Mom and Dad, I desided not to wait for you to come and get me. I think I can remember how to get home. Love, Arthur.

Tess, you need to forget what you don't remember and focus on what you do. You guys had, like, the epic summer. You'll never forget it. Hell, I won't forget it and I was just a jealous bystander.