Quotes About Memory

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought And with old woes new wail my dear times' waste.

He shall have a noble memory.

Memory, the warder of the brain.

Alas, poor Yorick I knew him Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy...

So may he rest, his faults lie gently on him!

Time hath a wallet at his back, wherein he puts. Alms for oblivion, a great-sized monster of ingratitudes.

My dad died of a stroke.

The strongest memory I have of that night is being chased around the bed.

So sweetly she bade me adieu, I thought that she bade me return.

would not be for the sake of a woman five years dead whose image in my mind was now as evanescent as the smell of lavender in an old drawer.

tibi terra levis. "May the earth lie light upon thee,

You are a memory too strong to leave this world...

We were traveling between a mountain and Thursday, Holding pages back on the calendar, Remembering every turn in the roadway: We hold that sky, we said, and remember. So magic a time it was that I was both brave and afraid. Some day like this might save the world.

Waiting for God" This morning I breathed in. It had rained early and the sycamore leaves tapped a few drops that remained, while waving the air's memory back and forth over the lawn and into our open window. Then I breathed out. This deliberate day eased past the calendar and waited. Patiently the sun instructed the shadows how to move; it held them, guided their gradual defining. In the great quiet I carried my life on, in again, out again.

Now I carry those days in a tiny box wherever I go. I open the lid like this and let the light glimpse and then glance away. There is a sigh like my breath when I do this. Some days I do this again and again. — William Stafford, from "Remembering," The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems , ed. Robert Bly (HarperPerennial, 1993)

Father and son No sound - a spell- on, on out where the wind went, our kite sent back its thrill along the string that sagged but sang and said, "I'm here! I'm here!" - till broke somewhere, gone years ago, but sailed forever clear of earth. I hold-whatever tugs the other end-I hold that string.

Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

Memory in its ordinary way summoned harvested fields, and haycocks and autumn hedges, the first of the fuchsia, the last of the wild sweetpea. It brought the lowing of cattle, old donkeys resting, scampering dogs, and days and places.

But you didn't lose touch with a place when it wasn't there any more, you didn't lose touch with yourself as you were when you were part of it, with your childhood, with your simplicity then.

All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife's response that came - as if in compensation for too little said before - when he wondered why his wandering had led him back to these old battlefields: in his sixty-ninth year he was establishing his survivor's status.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,The earth, and every common sight,To me did seemAppareled in celestial light,The glory and the freshness of a dream.It is not now as it hath been of yore—Turn wheresoe'er I may,By night or day,The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

O joy! that in our embersIs something that doth live,That nature yet remembersWhat was so fugitive!

I listened, motionless and still And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more.

That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower. We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.