Quotes About Memory

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

A Latin teacher told me I might make a good actress, and that stuck in my memory. I did some modeling, and Polanski gave me that small part.

When I was growing up, everybody in charge, my parents and teachers, had all survived the war, and they talked about the war like it was the Kraken - you know, this huge beast that roamed the earth during their formative years.

As history teaches us, freedom is never forgotten by those who have known it, and then lost it.

You're burned into my mind forever.

How did you say goodbye to someone who wasn't exactly gone

I leaned toward him, hoping the corset top would do half my work for me in smoothing the matter over. "Do you remember that one scene in The Glass House? The one where O'Neill walks that waitress home?" He raised an eyebrow. "Um, I wrote that scene.

After passing four hundred Italian slave laborers swaddled in rags, Eric Sevareid took inventory of his own sentiments: "a kind of dull satisfaction, a weary incapacity for further stimulation, a desire to go home and not have to think about it anymore—and a vague wondering whether I could ever cease thinking about it as long as I lived.

The journalist Edward R. Murrow, rarely at a loss for imagery, found that Buchenwald beggared the imagination. "The stink was beyond all description," he told his radio audience. "For most of it I have no words.… If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry.

Sergeant Samuel Allen, Jr., a former college student who had led his own swing band in the palmy days of peace, tried to explain in a letter home the flinty nihilism that made young men at war seem so old when they contemplated the dead. "We have found that it is best to forget about those friends, not to talk about them," he wrote. "They don't even exist.

a vivid, wonderful world so full of winter and spring, warm rain and cold snow, adventures and contentments, good things and bad. How often you will have me near you when wood smoke drifts across the wind, or the first tulips arrive, or the sky darkens in a summer storm…. Think of me today, and in the days to come, as I am thinking of you this minute, not gone or alone or dead, but part of the earth beneath you, part of the air around you, part of the heart that must not be lonely.

Where, precisely, was Private Anthony N. Marfione when he died on December 24, 1942? What were the last conscious thoughts of Lieutenant Hill P. Cooper before he left this earth on April 9, 1943? Was Sergeant Harry K. Midkiff alone when he crossed over on November 25, 1942, or did some good soul squeeze his hand and caress his forehead? The dead resist such intimacy. The closer we try to approach, the farther they draw back, like rainbows or mirages.

May the earth lie lightly on his bones.

Yet the war and all that the war contained—nobility, villainy, immeasurable sorrow—is certain to live on even after the last old soldier has gone to his grave. May the earth lie lightly on his bones.

I think it may be fine to live in the past if that is where your people have all disappeared to - if that is a place where things still make some kind of sense to you.

Yet how lovely, to think that a person can live forever as long as one last bird sings in the dying light of one more day.

But I am a Southerner, and it is our prerogative, being us, to remember things as well damn well please.

I believe a cast-off dog does not easily forget the life it had before.

The Pontiac dented and rust-flecked meant it was 1974, since cars are the way working-class people of the deep south truly mark their time. Listen to them sometime, when they're roping for a memory – they will find it next to a yellow Oldsmobile.

Passion is something you really don't miss, after it has cooled. It is like looking at an empty bottle on the side of the road and thinking, "Boy, I wish I had a Coke." The loves you miss are the ones that go away when they are still warm, even hot, to the touch.

It was a good moment, the kind you would like to press between the pages of a book, or hide in your sock drawer, so you could touch it again.

This is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment.

He won't remember any of this, he's too young and it's too painful. Children are wonderfully self-preserving. They filter memory, cleanse and sanitise it, unless it's too awful to renounce. And this isn't. Or is it? These gummy spots of time that inextricably adhere when so much more is erased, how do we account for their tenacity?

The past was so past it hurt.