Quotes About Memory

One thing I'd learned from all the burying I'd attended was that sometimes it's hard to pay attention. Burying someone you know will set your mind down some distant trail, as the one you're really on is too painful to view. at the burial of Ernest, Sarah's brother p177

I was going through the botanical theory book, and while I was reading I remembered something Blue Horse said to me back before Gilbert was born. He said wisdom is not a path, it is a tree.

I make believe all my dear ones are not gone, just out of my line of sight beyond some curtain or cluster of people, or tree

Mama told me to make a special point to remember the best times of my life. There are so many hard things to live through, and latching on to the good things will give you strength to endure, she says. So I must remember this day. It is beautiful and this seems like the best time to live and the best place

Mama said it's probably because of Suzanne, and that you are never the same after a child dies. That made me wonder what she was like before Clover died, because I don't think I really knew my own mother until I had children, and if she was different before, I don't remember.

I must think about something else for a while. But then I remember his warn arms and his big strong legs touching mine and how hard and wide his chest was and how hot his kiss was, and I got outside and feed the chickens. They are getting mighty fat.

Te quiero. ¿Podrás al menos tenerlo presente?

Annie, la profesora Widmer tenía razón. La verdad nos hace libres, ¿te acuerdas? Annie, ya soy libre. Y te quiero. ¡Te quiero muchísimo!

Ask friends about the people and places that shaped them, and summer springs up quickly when they tell their story: their first kiss, first beer, first job that changed everything.

So, Josh wore the picture of a man he spoke of with reverence, but who had been dead his whole life. I wanted to know about feeling a passion so strong you needed to wear it for the world to see. -Eliza

And he was equally sure that he would never stop loving. He would go to his grave married in his heart to Edith Cushing, and perhaps, if there were such things as ghosts and the fates were kind, he would be able to watch over her, and her children, and her grandchildren and keep her free from danger.

But I cannot leave you, Edith. In fact, I find myself thinking of you at the most inopportune moments of the day. I feel as if a link, a thread, exists between your heart and mine. And that, should that link be broken by distance or time... well, I fear my heart would cease to beat and die. And you'd soon forget about me." Edith found breath to speak. "Never. I would never forget you.

Quelle [est] la quantité minimale de passé nécessaire à la production de sens?

Yet the explanation was simple. These memories had died of inanition. You've got the pay visits to your memories from time to time. You've got to feed them, take them out and air them, show them around, tell them to other people or to yourself. If you don't, they waste away.

Le Neil qui parlait était amnésique. Sa main qui écrivait ne l'était pas. (p.80)

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.

People can choose to treasure those parts of their heritage that they see as favorable and wish to keep, jettisoning what unpleasant truths they would prefer to forget.

There is no remembrance of those who failed, those without heirs or legacies.

Korsakoff's syndrome

the person's memory is or how strange his behavior, he is still a unique and special human being. We can continue to love a person even after he has changed drastically and even when we are deeply troubled

The capacity to dream beyond the facts of existence into their significance enables us to remember a true past, one that simultaneously reflects and illuminates experience.

Freudian notion that people act out what they cannot remember or what they cannot allow themselves to feel. It follows that as long as people are able to enact a dynamic (in this case, most frequently a disavowed dependency or a compulsion to be in control), they do not have to think about why they persistently behave in a particular way. When there are no negative consequences for their behavior, interpretations just roll off them.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

There are also some moving sections about World War II in Anthony Burgess's Any Old Iron, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, Kit Reed's At War As Children, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, and Nancy Willard's Things Invisible to See.