Quotes About Memory

Isabel's indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.

I take picture because i like to look at the pictures I take. It seems to me that when people take a picture of something, they instantly forget about it. They can look at the picture and remind themselves.

If there are more dead than living, then the world is about death, and the question is: What are we to do with all the death? Who is going to remember all the dead?

I think it is about life. I think there is always more life than death. Those who lived are always alive for someone. Those who are alive remember life, not death. And when you are dead nothing happens. Death is nothing.

Perhaps if they all remained silent for as long as possible, they'd slip out of this moment into the next one, and then the next one, until all the preceding moments were erased from memory and everything could start all over again. The ultimate American dream: the eternal present, where nothing has ever happened before what is happening now.

He who recollects a thing by which he was once pleased desires to possess it in the same circumstances as when he first was pleased by it. He who was never pleased is doomed to an eternal hard-on.

He who recollects a thing by which he was once pleased desires to possess it in the same circumstances as when he first was pleased by it.

He probably came here to like live for free with his grandmother. Mrs. Alzheimer, née Loaded.

Only the past matters, because it is the only thing that outlives everything and everyone.

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

It's a strange grief… to die of nostalgia for something you you will never live.

Reasons get forgotten.

Né una lettera, né due, né un volume intiero potrebbero bastare per tutto quello che avrei da dirvi, per tutto quello che avrei da chiedervi; ed è necessario ch'io tenga viva sempre la speranza di rivedervi, di passare un po' di tempo con voi, perché il ricordo della vostra amicizia non sia triste e cocente per me nella misura stessa in cui mi è caro.

oral history is ultimately ... a document that we do not find but rather cocreate inside the interview

An interview, then, is a moment in a relationship between times: the time of the events, the time of the telling, and, when we factor in the archive, the time of listening.

The interview gives us access not to the experience but to a verbal rendition of the memory of that experience, generated by the presence of the interviewer.

The digital book has no front or back covers; there is no place to assert ownership, and there is nothing to own. "The digital delivery module" is a piece of molded plastic made in China, encasing a few memory chips. That is not the book, that's the "reader." Wait, I thought I was the reader. Oh, never mind.

I don't really watch my own old films, unlike Ronald Reagan, who sat in the White House and reran Knute Rockne — All American [1940] again and again. That way madness lies — though I must say, of my own films ...

Love does not forget!

I don't keep a travel diary. I did keep a travel diary once and it was a big mistake. All I remember of that trip is what I bothered to write down. Everything else slipped away, as though my mind felt jilted by my reliance on pen and paper. For exactly the same reason I don't travel with a camera. My holiday becomes the snapshots and anything I forget to record is lost.

The dilapidation was not a memory but a representation of a poorly remembered past.

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal; love leaves a memory no one can steal.

Your duty is to society, and the dead have always been a part of society. How we treat the dead says much about us.