Quotes About Memory

But all this means nothing. Gerda is not there. Only in my mind. The mind that is helped and solaced by the same demons, the same friends, who have destroyed the mind of an Iris who is close to me now, closer to me than ever, and yet far away. Walking in a dream, with Iris beside me.

But all the while, in the back of his mind, he carried around the memory of the eerie scene that had been played before his eyes in that dark back room in the Fitzwilliam Inn.

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for the dying.

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this — as in other ways — they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

The inability to remember is itself perhaps a memory.

Publicity is in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future... According to publicity, to be sophisticated is to live beyond conflict.

Sorrel soup: "You cut the egg into slices, and you eat it with the green soup. And the mixture of the sharp green acidity and the round comfort of the egg reminds you of something extraordinary and far away. Of home? Certainly not, not even for Poles. Of what then? ...Of survival, perhaps.

The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.

When I open my wallet to show my papers pay money or check the time of a train I look at your face. The flower's pollen is older than the mountains Aravis is young as mountains go. The flower's ovules will be seeding still when Aravis then aged is no more than a hill. The flower in the heart's wallet, the force of what lives us outliving the mountain. And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.

Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented ; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked - and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people. Later still this specific vision of the image-maker was also recognized as part of the record. An image became a record of how X had seen Y.

Silencio. Apago la linterna frontal. Oscuridad. En la oscuridad, el silencio se hace enciclopédico, condensa todo lo que ha ocurrido en el intervalo entre el entonces y el ahora.

The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.

I remember having the same sensation in Gordon Avenue. The two moments, instead of being separated by decades, belong to the same hour of the same season. I wipe and close the knife. A kind of vertigo overcomes me. Words make no more sense. Everything is a continuum.

The tombstones are not very different from those in other European cemeteries. Many record the deaths of several generations: the name, the year of birth, the day of death and the place of death, if it was not on the island. A name and two dates, the last one precise to the very day. This is what is recorded. About what happened between, apart from the bare fact of survival, not a word is written.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

Like most adventures, it was best experienced in the telling, rather than the execution.

There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them.

Their lost voices Must continue to be heard.

And though I'm happy now sitting in Hampstead High Street in the sunshine, the happiness of the memory is a different kind of happiness, the happiness of youth, the happiness of an infinite amount of possibilities.