Quotes About Memory

Memory is a deadly disease for a refugee; it's his cancer of the soul.

das verlorene Bereitsein meiner Jugend

And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do . . . it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man itself it is not. We could never regain the old intimacy with those scenes.

?udno je - re?e Lenc posle izvesnog vremena. - ?udno je da se spomenici podižu svim mogu?im ljudima, a nikad mesecu ili rascvetalom drvetu.

Über diesen Feldern scheinen die verlorenen Jahre weiter zu bestehen, die Jahre, die nicht gewesen sind, die keine Ruhe finden – der Schrei der Jugend wurde zu früh erstickt, fand ein zu jähes Ende. In der Nacht brechen sie aus der Erde hervor wie geisterhafte Irrlichter.

The noises from outside all merge into one another, become a dream which disappears from the waking memory...he sees the woods and stars behind him, and so he moves on, an ordinary soldier, with his big boots and his webbing and his pack, making his tiny way under the sky's great vault along the road that lies before him; a soldier who forgets things quickly and who isn't even depressed much any more, but who just goes onwards under the great night sky.

Habit is the explanation of why we seem to forget things so quickly.

Viss, ko cilv?ks p?rdz?vojis, k??st par d?ku. Pret?ga padar?šana! Un, jo briesm?g?ks kaut kas bijis, jo d?kain?ks tas k??st atmi??s.

Erich Maria Remarque

We forget nothing really . . . the front-line days . . . are too grievous for us to be able to reflect on them at once. If we did, we should have been destroyed long ago . . . - terror . . . kills, if a man thinks about it.

I won't be seeing you again, he said. It's just as well. I've told you too much to want to see you again. I wasn't so sure of that. It seemed possible that he would want to see me later on for that very reason. I alone, he believed, possessed an unfalsified image of his life. But that could make him hate me; perhaps he would feel that I had taken his wife from him, this time irrevocably—if he really believed that his own memory deceived him and only mine remained clear.

?udna stvar'', mislim, ''videli smo toliko mrtvaca u ratu, i znamo da nas je dva miliona beskorisno palo - zašto smo onda tako uzbu?eni zbog jednog jedinog, a dva miliona smo ve? skoro zaboravili?'' No to je valjda zato što je pojedinac uvek smrt - a dva miliona uvek samo statistika.

all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death.

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping.

there'll be a few problems with Hans Kramer's body on Judgement Day when they try to resurrect what was left after the shell hit him.

Die Schwierigkeit mit dem Krieg ist, dass die Leute, die ihn wollen, nicht erwarten, in ihm zu sterben. Und die Schwierigkeit mit unserer Erinnerung ist, dass sie vergisst und verändert und verfälscht, um zu überleben. Sie macht den Tod zu einem Abenteuer, wenn der Tod dich verfehlt. Aber der Tod ist kein Abenteuer: Töten ist der Sinn des Krieges, - nicht Überleben.

Sometimes I ask myself what I would be if Jenny were alive. And then I answered: I would also be alive.

Sometimes I ask myself what I would be if Jenny were alive. And then I answer:I would also be alive.

No one ever remembered a nice day. But no one ever forget the feel of paralyzed fish, the thud of walnut-sized hail against a horse's flank, or the way a superheated wind could turn your eyes to burlap.

You wish you had not come. If there were not so many around, you would reach out your arms, with the prayer on your lips for it all to come back to you. It seems cruel, cruel, to give us such a vision; to let us dream and drift through heaven for six months, and then to take it out of our lives.

Upon learning that Hall was the man who had invented the typewriter she used so often, the girl put her arms around his neck and gave him a huge hug and kiss. Forever afterward, whenever Hall told this story of how he met Helen Keller, tears would fill his eyes.

Of the four men in Preston Prichard's cabin, D-90, only one survived, his friend Arthur Gadsden. Prichard's body was never recovered, yet in the red volume that now contains the beautifully archived replies to Mrs. Prichard's letters there exists a surprisingly vivid sense of him, as though he resided still in the peripheral vision of the world.

He glanced back. Two images became impressed in his memory. One was of a collapsible lifeboat slipping from the ship, still sheathed in its protective cover; the other, of Captain Turner in full dress uniform still on the bridge as the Lusitania began its final dive.

A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting. J. M. Barrie "Dedication" Peter Pan 1904