Quotes About Memory

memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized.

At Evensong one night, while Holly played at sax and Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer joined in, I saw him: Holiday, racing past a fluffy white Samoyed. He had lived to a ripe old age on earth and slept at my father's feet after my mother left, never wanting to let him out of his sight... I waited for him to sniff me out, anxious to know if here, on the other side, I would still be the little girl he slept beside. I did not have to wait long: he was so happy to see me, he knocked me down.

I loved the way the burned-out flashcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever except for a picture.

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really hoose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down.

Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Daddy misses! His two little frogs of girls, that's who. They know where they are, do you, do you?

Every time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never reopened or reread.

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn't there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn it up.

News slipped out and the world didn't explode and eventually I could count on passing out. I had a headache in the morning and I always threw up, but Jamie, and everyone, it seemed, liked me when I was drunk. The added bonus: I often didn't remember much.

I wish I had known enough to do the same...tell her I loved her on that last day.

In moments like this she thought of all the little girls who grew into adulthood and old age as a sort of cipher alphabet for all those who didn't. Their lives would somehow be inextricably attached to all the girls who had been killed.

All of them are gone except for me.. And for me.. Nothing is gone.

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.

What is the purpose of memory? Is it a trick to make sure we don't forget who we are by reminding us of who we were?

Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known.

The only way to solace anyone who loved you in life is to be a good memory

And I don't believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something different that I'll have to speak to in a different way, but you not dead to me Nettie. And never will you be.

Even as I hold you I think of you as someone gone far, far away. Your eyes the color of pennies in a bowl of dark honey bringing sweet light to someone else your black hair slipping through my fingers is the flash of your head going around a corner your smile, breaking before me, the flippant last turn of a revolving door, emptying you out, changed, away from me. Even as I hold you I am letting go.

You must run around like a crazy person or walk sedately honoring the dead.

Do you know what O'Keefe Says about blue? he asked her, blowing out a cloud of smoke, warming to her voice, though he did not remember her face clearly from the opening night's exhibition. What? That it is the color that will remain after everything is destroyed.

The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries (museums), and not yourselves, are full.

It is the need to be remembered that has caused most of the trouble in the world

They think they can kill a continent—people, trees, buffalo—and then fly off to the moon and just forget about it. But you and me we're going to remember the people, the trees and the fucking buffalo. Goddammit.