Quotes About Memory

My God, can it be that nothing inside of us ever gets washed away? We go on living as if nothing at all had happened, then suddenly the poison deep in our hearts comes rising up to the surface.

Both of us, together in the same delirium, yoked up together for the selfsame chore. Dragging the waters, together. Our huge nets scraping the ocean floor for its meager treasures. Infallible, a madman's memory drags up details like mussel shells.

All suffering has an end, David, if only you wait long enough. Sorrow has its life like people. Sorrow is born and lives and dies. And when it's dead and gone, someone's left behind to remember it. Exactly like people.

There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.

Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather—storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.

Long after you've forgotten someone's voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.

The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love." from "Memoriam

You've tormented my dreams and tortured my days. I hear your voice in other women's voices. The scent of your hair teases my senses…a memory I can't expunge. You haunt me, coming between me and my work and my pleasures, and so I'm going to exorcise you. I'm going to take you, to satiate myself with you until I no longer want you. Since you won't come to me freely, you'll come to me under duress, but come to me you will.

Names are like codes, yes? Like magic codes. They have everything that ever happened to you squeezed tightly inside them.

Ik zag geen bietebauw, maar wel waren de geesten van de pokkedoden van Antwerpen in de vorm van een zwerm spreeuwen in de kastanjeboom neergestreken. Met hun honderden zwarte lijfjes zetten ze de boom voortijdig in blad. Ze vlogen in slierten op en streken opnieuw neer alsof ze vastzaten aan een laken dat door een reuzenvrouw werd opgeschud.

No matter how long we exist, we have our memories. Points in time which time itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of ther beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems.

I have an idea for a story. I keep the idea in a special place in my brain and I pull it out every once in a while to examine it, expand it, let it breathe.

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

I know that I have died before—once in November.

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year's cupful and downward into a decade's quart and downward into a lifetime's ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman's float.

The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.

Pain engraves a deeper memory.

I refuse to remember the dead. And the dead are bored with the whole thing. But you - you go ahead, go on, go back down, into the graveyard, lie down where you think their faces are; talk back to your old bad dreams.

You fell, she said, just remember you fell. I fell, is all he told the doctors in the big hospital. A nice lady came and asked him questions but because he didn't want to be sent away he said, I fell. He never said anything else although he could talk fine.

I know that I have died before—once in November, once in June. How strange to choose June again

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

If we constantly rewrite history to fit how we see things now, we forget how things used to be and, equally important to future scholars, how we used to see them.

People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes,' he said. 'The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it's like missing water. Every day, you notice the person's absence more.