Quotes About Memory

This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.

The moment is altered as soon as I try to capture it, so for me, it's impossible." How true, I thought. Moments are gone as soon as you think about them.

I threw my head back and smiled proudly to myself. And then I draped the large embroidered red scarf over my face and covered these thoughts up. But underneath the scarf I still knew who I was. I made a promise to myself: I would always remember my parents' wishes, but I would never forget myself.

I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.

I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place.

My mother knows how to hit a nerve. And the pain I feel is worse than any other kind of misery. Because what she does always comes as a shock, exactly like an electric jolt, that grounds itself permanently in my memory.

That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love—that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more, maybe less, ten thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination—and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.

In two years' time, my scar became pale and shinny and I had no memory of my mother. That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.

Qué es el pasado si no aquello que elegimos recordar?

Sólo recuerdas lo que quieres recordar. Sólo sabes lo que tu corazón te permite saber.

But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day because it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness, the wonder, fear, and loneliness. How I lost myself. I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.

Y me hice una promesa: siempre recordaría los deseos de mis padres, pero jamas me olvidaría de mi misma.

Where did he go when he left us? I spied the new journal he had started using just last week and held it against my chest. This was who he was. But it also was not. It was sad and beautiful knowledge that a person cannot be found elsewhere but in his own spirit. No one could possess it.

But your thoughts and emotions after death are no different from what they were when you were alive, I suppose. You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.

my room, and to rub his scent off me.

Do you know why that is? Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?

Mile after mile, all of it familiar, yet not, this distance that separates us, me from my mother.

I watch them continue to argue, although perhaps it is not arguing. They are remembering together, dreaming together.

Absolutely. I remember." "Funny, I thought you did." "Ah, you assumed!" He laughed. "Your mother isn't the only one with memory problems. Well, if I said it, then I was wrong, because I do think it's important to have certain assumptions—for one thing, that the person who's with you is there for the long haul, that he'll take care of you and what comes with you, the whole package, mother and

Isn't the past what people remember- who did what, how and why? And what the people remember, isn't that mostly what they've already chosen to believe?

If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses. "This a secret

Well, let me tell you, your recollection of every last detail has nothing to do with memory. It's called holding a goddamn grudge. ... That's what I remember the most, not addresses but pain - that old lump-in-the-throat conviction that the world had fingered me for abuse and neglect. Is that the same as a grudge?

I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.

What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.