Quotes About Memory

That way, if my mama ever came back, I could recognize her, and I would be able to grab her and hold on to her tight and not let her get away from me again.

tongue after you lose a tooth. Time after time, my mind kept going to that empty spot, the spot where I felt like she should be. When I told Gloria Dump about Otis and how he got arrested, she laughed so hard she had to grab hold of her false teeth so they wouldn't fall out of her mouth.

I kept on going over and over the list in my head. I memorized it the same way I had memorized the list of ten things about my mama. I memorized it so if I didn't find him, I would have some part

Where had Mrs. Borkowski's should gone? (p. 139)

Franny Block is in charge of them all. She is a very small, very old woman with short gray hair, and she was the first friend I made in Naomi.

That was why I kept stealing books out of the parlor and returning them. For the only books I ever took were my father's journals. Didn't I have some right to them, being that they, and I, were all that remained of him?

Words are our only weapons against the lies of history. We must bear witness to the truth. If we do not, those we love die twice over.' He paused. 'I will not find peace until I know how it ended.

Die Toten hinterlassen ihre Schatten, einen Nachhall des Raumes, den sie einst bewohnten. Sie suchen uns heim, werden nie schwächer oder älter als wir. Wir betrauern nicht nur den Verlust ihrer Zukunft, sondern auch den der unseren.

Wie sehr wollte ich sie vor dem Schmerz des Erinners bewahren.

Ich vermochte kaum den Kopf hochzuhalten. Ich wollte mich befreien, dem Gefängnis meiner Erinnerung entfliehen.

Die derzeitigen und früheren Bewohner von Nulle wussten, wie abgründige Trauer den Geist zerfrisst.

What we leave behind in this life is the memory of who we were and what we did. An imprint, no more. I have learned much. I have become wise. But have I made a difference? I cannot tell.

how his grandfather used to stroke his brow

That which was and is no more is hidden treasure.

You die twice. Once when your heart stops beating and again when your name is spoken for the last time.

I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you? Have I told you his was a beautiful smile? Not the smile of a cynic, nor the easy, hungry smile of boys his age, whose smiles that aim to get them somewhere, are a commodity in exchange for God knows what. No. His was completely without intent; an accident of a smile. The kind of smile that would have surprised him if he could have seen it for himself. But he was too young to know his own extraordinariness.

I don't know how others reconcile what happened before with what happens now. For me, the past is a cool, dark pond in which I will always stand partially submerged. That's just the way it is.

So here is what actually happened, what happens still: the scene on its parallel track to now, to me: linear and constant, never passing into the past, never speeding into the future.

Someone once told me a memory is just another draft of a story.

In the months to come, I would look back on this time in my life almost as a kind of out-of-body travel, from which I had returned with nothing but a sense memory of having been somewhere inexpressibly exciting and far away. It wasn't like a dream, exactly, although it had a dream's strange internal logic. It was like looking through the window of an airplane at night, the way the city below appears so near, yet untouchable beyond the glass--a network of lights, flames, stars.

The past is never where you think you left it.

From Old Mortality ] The woman in the picture. . . was only a ghost in a frame, and a sad, pretty story from old times.

The past is never where you think you left it: you are not the same person you were yesterday—oh

My heart died. Arty would despise her. But Mama told me to go on hoping. Go ahead and love her, Mama said. I've wondered since whether those were Mama's last words, the final sizzle of her synapses.