Quotes About Memory

A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body.

Even our strongest emotions die, don't you think? And we can look back to the woman we were three years ago with the same curiosity and detachment as if it were someone else.

Parfois, il est vrai, le coeur veut crever de chagrin. Mais souvent aussi, le soir de préférence, je ne puis m'empêcher de penser qu'Ernie Levy, mort six millions de fois, est encore vivant, quelque part, je ne sais où... Hier, comme je tremblais de désespoir au milieu de la rue, cloué au sol, une goutte de pitié tomba d'en haut sur mon visage; mais il n'y avait nul souffle dans l'air, aucun nuage dans le ciel... il n'y avait qu'une présence.

Tandis que son corps la lâche, Marie se souvient : "Je ne serai pas ta routine." Et Steph de rétorquer : "Je ne deviendrai jamais ton habitude.

Yo luzco y difumino tus aires, para que pasen a ser esencia trágica de los que ya me conocen, de los que me ven y ya no me olvidan. Para los muertos

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can't drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

He tried to remember her ever being this way before. In her voice--almost overexuberant--was not simply holiday cheer but joyous relief, like some terminally ill patient who's just been told she's not sick anymore.

Fiecare duce, în noapte, o amintire a lui.

Perhaps she's in love with the last memory she has of you.

The memory of the aged becomes clearer and clearer with time. It has no pity.

That night when you kissed me, I left a poem in your mouth, and you can hear some of the lines every time you breathe out.

She felt the breath of history on her cheek.

In the ghettos, as in the extermination camps to which they were the antechamber, the résistants embarked on a race against death. To struggle and resist was the only lucid choice, but this most often meant for the fighters no more than choosing the time and manner of their death. Beyond the immediate outcome of the struggle, which most often was inevitable, their combat was for history, for memory

They carried him not to bury him:They carried him down to crown him….The poet flourished here, disheveled,Who would not bow before votive lampsBut to the common spade.

Nostalgia is masochism and masochism is something masochists love to share.

It is a sad fact that all flesh must die, but there is no reason why one's story, as well as one's soul, should be slighted after the passage. The attraction artists feel for our cemeteries is only partly aesthetic; much of it is gossip, a continual whisper intended for the delighted ear. Marble without a story is just marble. A true monument leans over and murmurs in your ear.

In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection.

The first impression is the truth, and all that follows is merely the excuse of memory.

The urge is always with me to retouch yesterday's canvas with today's paintbrush and cover the things that fill me with regret

Sometimes love outlasts even death.

Everyone's past, I try to rationalize, is nothing more than the collection of memories they choose to remember.

have spent much time there, in this grand empty space between memory and desire, creating this cracked empire of sentences in which I now live.

When I had touched her that first time, it did not feel like the first time I had touched her.