Quotes About Memory

Only after my father's death could I speak my own individual truths about him. In a sense, I had to turn him into a character, a figure I could control through language.

I'm in constant inner dialogue with my father still.

I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.

I realized my father's sister Joanne, who died at 19 had instilled her spirit in me.

I mean my father was killed when I was six. And I only have tiny, tiny flashes of memory.

I just found out last week - my sister told me - that my father had some Beatles records. So I must have heard them quite a bit, but it never registered, really. Now I listen to them with new ears.

When I was ten, my pa told me never to talk to strangers. We haven't spoken since.

Father, thanks for reaching out and lovingly,saying that you've always been proud of me,I needed to feel that so desperately,you're always alive inside of me.

Decades later I would look into my father's eyes and try to reach past the murkiness of Alzheimer's with my words, my apology, hoping that in his heart he heard me and understood.

All the way from the first thing that I can remember, like our Victrola - a wind-up record player - and my grandfather's crystal radio, and my father's shortwave radio.

What scared me the most was when my father would put on the gasmask. His face would disappear... This was not a human being at all.

I visited my father for the full ten years that he was in prison, so we already had a deep and loving relationship, and remembered our mother at those times.

For all the ghosts and corpses that shall never know the breath of our children so long for the sacrifice and endurance of our mothers and the sustained breath of our fathers we live

My biggest fear is losing memory because memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive is tied up in memory.

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

So many people choose silence after the immediate wake of a death out of fear of saying something out of turn or "bringing up bad memories" that bereaved people often feel forgotten.

I remember fear and I remember the potential of nuclear war.

The past is always attractive because it is drained of fear.

In reality there is nothing to fear in the present. Fear is projected onto the present by memory.

I remember being awed by it - the uniqueness and nicety of style - and I suspect I was a bit jealous because we were more or less of the same generation.

The deeper the nostalgia and the more complete the fear, the purer, the richer the word and the secret.

You always have the memory of the bottom, and fear of the bottom. And when you start going to the bottom you panic.

Rather I fear on the contrary that while we banish painful thoughts we may banish memory as well.

If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river's murky waves.