Quotes About Memory

Soul memory is strong, but you are stronger.

The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best.

I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle.

As the years go by, my life keeps filling up with names like abandoned cemeteries or like an empty history class or a telephone book in a foreign city. And death is when someone behind you keeps calling and calling and you no longer turn around to see who.

Even my loves are measured by wars. I say, "That happened after the Second World War." "We met a day before the Six Day War." I would never say "before the peace of '45-'48" or "in the middle of the peace of '56-'67." Yet the knowledge of peace makes its way from one place to another like children's games, which are so much alike everywhere you go.

I'm like a rifle that's a little out of date but very accurate: when I love, there's a strong recoil, back to childhood, and it hurts.

Cuando buscas sabiduría, la primera fase es el silencio, la segunda fase es la escucha, la tercera fase es el recuerdo, la cuarta es la práctica y la quinta la enseñanza".

I bent down to I-330 and drank her in with my eyes for the last time.

Once in a while I get an email from someone I have met briefly. "You may not remember me," these emails often begin, the hope to be remembered expressed by the acceptance of having already been forgotten.

I never showed up in her dreams, I am certain, as people we keep in our memories rarely have a place for us in theirs.

Our masters say that real arts never die. Real arts are about remembrance.

she knew that in all stories she must be left out-the life she had made for herself was a life of flight, of discarding the inessential and the essential alike, making use of the stolen pieces and memories, retreating to the lost moments of other people's lives.

The boy will remain a son and never become a father. He will be forgotten by the crowd once his blood is rinsed clean from the ground; his sister will think of him but soon she will forget him, too. He will live on only in Han's memory, a child punished not for his own insincerity but someone else's disbelief.

There is a difference between being remembered and being caught by the mesh of one's mind.

Who among us dares to assert that our memories are not tainted by time, sweetest poison and bitterest antidote, untrustworthy ally, and reliable annihilator?

To say we know a person is to write that person off. This is at times life's necessity. We run out of time or patience or curiosity; or we depart, willingly or not, from the situation that makes investigation possible and necessary. A person written off may become a character - depending on the charity of memory.

but like all mothers whose children are growing up and drifting away from them, she felt an urge to stay in his shack as long as she could, to cling to anything that she could use, when he vanished from her life, to reconstruct a son from memory.

But how do you speak to a granddaughter in her dead mother's stead? Can the responsibility to the dead ever be replaced by the responsibility to the living?

I never showed up in her dreams, I am certain, as people we kep in our memories rarely have a place for us in theirs.

To be forgotten was a defeat. To be doomed to remember someone was a defeat, too.

I grew up with the dread of seeing piles of old newspapers collect dust and used matches put back into matchboxes. But more than that, I dreaded the memories that were not mine, yet were so adamant to be heard and remembered as the only memories that mattered.

It is difficult for anyone to watch someone close suffer. The grief comes from not understanding the pain, and from knowing that suffering, even when it ends, will live on as memory. A child does not, and should not, understand her parents' memories, yet this incomprehension does not offer exemption. The child in every one of us carries the burden of memory's melodrama, not only our own, but those before our time.

Perhaps when I say I was expecting his suicide, it is only memory going back to revise itself. There is no reason an artistic and sensitive boy could not grow into a happy man. Where and how things went amiss with him I do not know, though even as a teenager, I recognized his despondency when at school the production of his play earned him jeers and a special exhibition of his car designs estranged him from his classmates. He was the kind of person who needed others to feel his existence.