Quotes About Memory

el sótano; sí, estás en el sótano de la casa paterna, tú eres un niño, sólo has soñado que eras un adulto, un viejo y asqueroso vigilante en París, pero eres un niño y estás en el sótano de la casa paterna (...)

He had preserved the best part of her and made it his own: the principle of her scent.

Barry remembered his dad saying that the casualties of war couldn't be counted only among the dead and the wounded.

Everything comes down so pasteurized everything comes down 16 degrees they say your amplifier is too loud turn your amplifier down are we high all alone on our knees memory is just hips that swing like a clock the past projects fantastic scenes tic/toc tic/toc tic/toc fuck the clock!

We want thing we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment , sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.

I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates ...

Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.

I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.

Images have their way of dissolving and then abruptly returning, pulling along the joy and pain attached to them like tin cans rattling from the back of an old-fashioned wedding vehicle.

Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn't serve anyone, and it's painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you're magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person.

And then I walked out, straight through the twilight, treading the beaten earth. There were no dust clouds, no signs of anyone, but I paid no mind. I was my own lucky hand of solitaire. The desert landscape unchanging: a long, unwinding scroll that I would one day amuse myself by filling. I'm going to remember everything and then I'm going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a café. That's what I was thinking, in my dream, looking down at my hands.

Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.

Mommy, I said aloud, and I thought of her suddenly stopping what she was doing, often in the center of the kitchen, and invoking her own mother whom she lost when she was eleven years old. How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they're gone?

We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.

Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.

Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.

Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory. — Patti Smith, M Train (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

I tried to write something about Jesse but couldn't, as her face echoed her father's and the proud palace where the ghosts of our old life dwell.

I saw him paused before a headstone that read 'Son your mother is praying for you.

Such things that disappear in time that we find ourselves longing to see again. We search for them in close-up as we search for our hands in a dream.

Nothing really matches the atmosphere of the old Polaroid film. Except perhaps a poem, a musical phrase, or a forest hung with mist.

In the beginning was real time. A woman enters a garden that is bursting with color. She has no memory, only a burgeoning curiosity. She approaches the man. He is not curious. He stands before a tree.

I finally placed where the images in my morning dream might have come from - the Battle of Shiloh in the Civil War. Thousands of young soldiers lay dead on the battleground in a peach orchard in full bloom. It was said that the blossoms fell upon them, covering them like a thin layer of fragrant snow. I wondered why I had dreamed that, but then again, why do we dream about anything?

On Friday, the thirteenth of July, I gave a reading in memory of Jim Morrison on the roof of underground filmmaker Jack Smith's loft at Greene Street and Canal.