Quotes About Memory

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.

I walked into a bakery seven years later and there he was. He had dogs at his feet and a bird in a cage beside him. The seven years were not seven years. They were not seven hundred years. Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go right up to him.

He invented stories so fantastic she had to believe. Of cours, she was only a child, still removing the dust from her first death. What else could she do? And he was already accumulating the dust of his second death. What else could he do?

And the general shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when things hit the ground still. Anything.' If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again.

As for the bracelet Mom wore to the funeral, what I did was I converted Dad's last voice message into Morse code, and I used sky-blue beads for silence, maroon beads for breaks between letters, violet beads for breaks between words, and long and short pieces of string between the beads for long and short beeps, which are actually called blips, I think, or something. Dad would have known.

Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable—the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.

Ich versuche mich an alles zu erinnern, was ich getan habe, Oskar. Und alles, was ich nicht getan habe. Die Fehler, die ich begangen habe, sind mir egal. Aber was ich nie getan habe, kann ich auch nicht zurücknehmen.

He was caught somewhere between his mother's last kiss and the first kiss he would give his child, between the war that was and would be

Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled, just as the dead can never be counted.

I don't know how late it got. I probably fell asleep, but I don't remember. I cried so much that everything blurred into everything else. At some point she was carrying me to my room. Then I was in bed. She was looking over me. I don't believe in God, but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything ever could be. But it was also incredibly simple. In my only life, she was my mom, and I was her son.

We're here, the glow of 1804 will say in one and a half centuries. We're here, and we're alive.

He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depress the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too real chest, making his widower's remembrances that much more convincing and the pain that much more real.

Killing an animals oneself is more often then not a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember. This is perhaps more harmful than ignorance. It is always possible to wake someone from sleep, but there is no amount of noise that will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.

Hayat?m?n en güzel günlerinden biri, hayat?m? yaÅŸad???m ve hayat?m hakk?nda hiç düÅŸünmediÄŸim bir gündü.

Some of the names I could not reason, like the box marked DARKNESS, or the one with DEATH OF THE FIRSTBORN written in pencil on its front. I noticed that there was a box on the top of one of these skyscrapers of boxes that was marked DUST

And was the next word I lost, probably because it was so close to her name, what a simple word to say, what a profound word to lose.

That ghost of a smile fell away and receded and finally faded.

Or how he was once found on the well regarded Rabbi's front lawn, bound in white string, and said he tied one around his finger to remember something terribly important, and fearing he would forget the index finger, he tied a string around his pinky, and then one from waist to neck, and fearing he would forget this one, he tied a string from ear to tooth to scrotum heel, and used his body to remember his body, but in the end could only remember the string. Is this someone to trust for a story?

Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she has slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time.

We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

I would give everything never to think about her again, I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.

My father's face, when he said that, dissolved into a stillness, a sad expression, sadder than human feeling.

But that slip of paper wouldn't disappear, ever, and neither would the image of his prostrate wife, and neither would the thought that if he could, it might greatly improve his life to end it.