Quotes About Memory

You can pull a goat off into the field, but a memory you can only haul into the sun and hope it desiccates. Dries to something crumbled and odorless.

I breathed and thanked something that was not exactly God, something that was still here. I could almost imagine that it was still before when we were young and many things still lived.

He was aggregating memory like a wall against extinction and the little boxes of slides were his bricks.

I had painted a lot of landscapes, had stood before many while they burned their remote beauty into my skin, but had never done both at the same time. Don't know why. I was comfortable painting indoors and I liked best to retrieve those images from memory where they might be stained by awe and jumbled together with other things I loved. Now that I had tried the other, I wanted to do more.

But lying one night in my old bunk under a wide open window listening to a screech owl trying to terrify me with a woman's screams and only making me happy—the bittersweet cry of undigestible beauty and great impending loss—then it came to me: the obvious epiphany that he was reliving his life. Doh. Slide by slide, picture by picture. He was aggregating memory like a wall against extinction and the little boxes of slides were his bricks.

Tomorrow I will do it again but not the boy, I'll bury him not with any tenderness or regret just in one piece with his hawk feather.

The dead goats multiply. You can pull a goat off into the field, but a memory you can only haul into the sun and hope it desiccates. Dries to something crumbled and odorless.

People with good memories are liable to be crushed by the weight of their suffering. Only those with bad memories, the fittest to survive, can live on. - Lu Xun

Around a child, people come and go, objects appear and are taken away, surroundings take shape and disintegrate. And no explanation is given, because how can you explain the world to a child? So she had used the words. Words call forth and secure that which has gone away. With her lists she had ensured that whatever she had once known would come back

Remember me," whispers the dust.

That's the one good thing about the human brain, it constantly revises the past, cutting bits here, adding bits there, presenting it in an even more palatable way - the way we would have liked things to have been, rather than the way they really are.

But God remembered Noah and all the animals and livestock that were with him in the ark. And God sent a wind over the earth, and the waters began to subside.

From the Negev he journeyed from place to place toward Bethel, until he came to the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent had formerly been pitched,

But Lotís wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

So Jacob picked out a stone and set it up as a pillar,

and he said to his relatives, “Gather some stones.” So they took stones and made a mound, and there by the mound they ate.

Then Laban declared, “This mound is a witness between you and me this day.” Therefore the place was called Galeed.

Now Deborah, Rebekahís nurse, died and was buried under the oak below Bethel. So Jacob named it Allon-bachuth.

Jacob set up a pillar on her grave; it marks Rachelís tomb to this day.

And his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept in mind what he had said.

All his sons and daughters tried to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. “No,” he said. “I will go down to Sheol mourning for my son.” So his father wept for him.

The chief cupbearer, however, did not remember Joseph; he forgot all about him.

The abundance in the land will not be remembered, since the famine that follows it will be so severe.

Joseph named the firstborn Manasseh, saying, “God has made me forget all my hardship and all my fatherís household.”