Quotes About Memory

Citizen N°1: Look! Citizen N°2: up in the SKY! It's... who IS that? Ion (Kyle Rayner): See? Get some new clothes and everybody forgets who you...

There's too much history to tell, really, about all of us and how we'd do things like hike and how she loved that I ran so much.

99 percent of every beautiful thing you ever knew escaped and went back out into the world where you vaguely remembered it.

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood.

A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world

Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface.

The memory of odors is very rich. Now

We keep making decisions, every day, half without thinking, half against our will. If we don't fight back, if we allow ourselves to change, to be changed, then once it's done we have to do other things, and on and on until the person we wanted to be is so far away in the past that we only remember her, longingly, as if she were a beloved stranger.

Never in her life had she thought so much about him before. Twice in two minutes!

Her reaction signaled that his memory had the power to destroy.

It all came back. Every bone in my body turned hot. Then I couldn't make it stop. All those memories. Whatever kept them stored away broke. There was a rush of sensation through me, then nothing. And for days afterward, I'd get overwhelmed with a sound or the way my shirt rubbed against my arm or a smell. Like my body remembered and reminded the rest of me.

Y es raro porque, aunque pase el tiempo, el dolor de la pérdida, cuando se pone a doler, te sigue pareciendo igual de intenso.

Para vivir tenemos que narrarnos; somos un producto de nuestra imaginación. Nuestra memoria en realidad es un invento, un cuento que vamos reescribiendo cada día (lo que recuerdo hoy de mi infancia no es lo que recordaba hace veinte años); lo que quiere decir que nuestra identidad también es ficcional, puesto que se basa en la memoria.

In her own mind she was adding that forgiveness did not necessarily mean that forgetting went with it.

the nightmares of childhood never end but continue forever beneath the surface of memory as beneath the surface of choppy murky water. So long as memory and life endure.

It was good, and nothing good is truly lost. It stays part of a person, becomes part of their character. So part of you goes everywhere with me. And part of me is yours, forever

Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.

I was not prepared to think of the people I had lost, or to speak of them, although we did, carefully, without letting their names loose in the wind that would reach their ears. We feared that they would hear us and never rest, come back out of pity for the loneliness we felt.

TO LOVE Nanapush, to love at all, is like trying to remember the tune and words to a song that the spirits have given you in your sleep. Some days, I knew exactly how the song went and some days I couldn't even hum the first line.

The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home.

I bounced around on top naturally. But that belly, yai! It grew big as a hill and I couldn't see over it. I'd call out, Are you still back there? Holler to me! Like most fat Indians he did have a skinny butt. Man, those muscles in his back cheeks were powerful, too. He swung me around like a circus act. So I enjoyed him real well, those times were good. Awee, said Mooshum. His voice was wistful.

And so, you see, her absence stopped time. What

It was always what my father called the last leg of the journey. But we did not stop this time. We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.

I put her ashes in the Mississippi River not because she ever noticed the river or gave the slightest indication she wanted that, but because it was a way to think of her as she'd always been, wordless and inert, pulled along by a strong, hidden current.