Quotes About Memory

A memory is left when something happens and does not completely un-happen.

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely un-happen

he details everything around the beauty and excitement, which is enough to evoke it again for each of us, in the mind's eye, the gut, the secret heart, or wherever one's most vivid, passionate, lyric, and lavender images are stored. - Tobi Tobias, Balletgorey

I do remember with great pleasure, if not terribly clearly, a play by Richard Foreman with music by Stanley Silverman called Hotel For Criminals, which I saw in a sinisterly suitable mansion in the cultured wilds of western Massachusetts in the summer of 1974, and which could be described as based loosely on Fantomas.

the facts of history never come to us pure, since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should not be with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it.

It was a curious sort of immortality. Everyone in the world would repeat one hour, forever, and never realize that time had come to a quivering halt at that point. And Myron Castleman would be permitted to live forever, piling up experiences and memories, but each of only an hour's duration, each resumed at 12:01 PM on this balmy spring day in Manhattan, standing outside near the Grand Central Tower.

At the same time, his past lay before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed.

All she remembered was that Caligula had planned to torture his wife to find out why he was so devoted to her. What was David's excuse, she wondered.

The next thing that happened was that he forgot the last thing that happened.

When addicts turn away from the Lord and gaze at the object of their desire, God becomes a distant memory. Since one common belief is that God is going to keep us from something good, we try to distract ourselves from remembering him.

The lightness returned. That airless sensation of his body evaporating. Darline and Paris were fading, too. They were becoming distant longings, silhouettes, shadows fading on the ground. There are loves that outlive lovers.

My mother used to say that we'll all have three death: the one when our breath leaves our bodies to rejoin the air, the one when we are out back in the earth, and the one that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all.

There are loves that outlive lovers.

What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can't.

Why is it that when you lose something, it is always in the last place that you look for it? Because of course, once you remember, you always stop looking.

In my sleep, I see my mother rising, like the mother spirit of the rivers, above the current that drowned her. She is wearing a dress of glass, fashioned out of the hardened clarity of the river, and this dress flows like raised dust behind her as she runs towards me and enfolds me in her smoke-light arms. Her face is like mine now, in fact it is the exact same long, three-different-shades-of-night face, and she is smiling a both-row-of-teeth revealing smile.

This is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her.

For those we don't see For those who are not here.

Nineteen Thirty-Seven

We tell ourselves stories in order to live," the novelist and essayist Joan Didion famously wrote. We also tell ourselves stories in order not to die.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside us in the absence of an empathetic witness. —Peter Levine, The Unspoken Voice

We cannot write about death without writing about life. Stories that start at the end of life often take us back to the past, to the beginning - or to some beginning - to unearth what there was before, what will be missed, what will be lost.

Another lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can't be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market to-day has happened before and will happen again. I've never forgotten that. I suppose I really manage to remember when and how it happened. The fact that I remember that way is my way of capitalizing experience.

Children are apt to forget to remember.