Quotes About Memory

That is how the dead survive: they live in our memories, and some of the times that is a good thing and beautiful, and other times it is not good, and then the dead are like a virus in the blood, an infection of the mind.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

I never heard of an old man forgetting where he had buried his money! Old people remember what interests them: the dates fixed for their lawsuits, and the names of their debtors and creditors.

The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.

The life of the dead is placed on the memories of the living. The love you gave in life keeps people alive beyond their time. Anyone who was given love will always live on in another's heart.

Perhaps, to the uninformed, it may appear unaccountable that a man should be able to retain in his memory such a variety of learning but the close alliance with each other, of the different branches of science, will explain the difficulty.

Pour qui est né après la seconde guerre mondiale, ces événements vieux d'un demi-siècle sont comme des histoires de loups-garous. Cependant le message par lequel s'achève le compte-rendu de ces événements, et qui ne devait être que symbolique, est devenu d'actualité. (postface, 1993)

The past is a closed door.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.

But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

Gathering the golden harvest through long summer days leaves a lasting sweetness to ripen in a man's soul. The smell of newly carted hay can be a lasting memory even in strange cities.

But it is pleasant to be remembered in England.

In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped mens bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.

Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I dont ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.

Wherever the living are,' whispered my foster mother, 'the dead will be there too.

Oh, he was just angry, we tell ourselves when someone blurts out something he later apologizes for. But a word, once spoken, lingers forever; to keep peace we pretend to forget, but we never do. Strange that a spoken word can have such lasting power when words carved on stone monuments vanish in spite of all our efforts to preserve them. What we would lose persists, lodged in our minds, and what we would keep is lost to water, moths, moss.

Some things can be recovered. Some things can be restored. But some lost things, we seek forever.

There was some reason to call Pole heartless. His blood ran thinly in an effete body; no human emotion was urgent in him, neither love of family nor of country, and certainly not of women. But now he was forced to remember that his mother was also a woman, and to realize that her fate had lain at his door.

Above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand. I wonder if she stands there yet, in memory of her who relinquished her feeble ghost as I gained my stubborn one, my mother's angel that my father bought in pride to mark her bones and proclaim his dynasty, as he fancied, forever and a day.

The glories of the past compensated for the imperfections of the present.

These were true things, Laura knew, but they were only part of the truth which was something less orderly than Kate made it sound. Some parts of the full, disorderly truth were lodged in Kate and Laura like splinters of corroding steel. Their feelings had grown around the sharp, wounding edges which didn't hurt anymore but were still there, fossils of pain laid down in the mixed-up strata of memory.