Quotes About Memory

After all, God is God because he remembers.

No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.

That is my major preoccupation --memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.

For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.

I shall always remember that smile. From what world did it come from?

I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.

I had a slab of German chocolate cake the size of a child's tombstone. Ralph

That's a weak definition of narrative. That's saying that narrative is just memory plus causality. But, for us, the narrative has aesthetics, too.

There are certain books that one remembers together with the material circumstances of reading: how long it took, the time of year, the color of the cover.

I would never write about that. It was enough I had wasted the time once. I would never waste more time by writing about it.

It was happening again now: some pieces of some larger story that I could barely make out were flying into new positions, and I was remembering things I had forgotten, and putting them together differently, and all while I was sitting still and not going anywhere or doing anything—though in another way I was hurtling north at five hundred miles an hour.

I don't see Peter," Own said, coming out of the turnstile behind me. But I van was there, reading a paperback novel. The book looked so small in his hands, almost unstable, like it might crumble to dust. He had a tan and looked at once different from my memory and unmistakably himself. I was so happy that the first thing I said to him instead of hello was "Thank you.

Time and distance have a way of playing tricks with your best intentions.

Our age is so resolutely unheroic, and the employment opportunities for registered demigods are now so scarce, that all we can do, in our enfeebled state, is laugh with envy and disbelief at the memory of those who still had the wit and the wherewithal to live large.

But if you stuck around long enough at the time, the dead and wounded piled up so quickly they squeezed one another off the narrow platforms of your memory.

Nothing is ever more appreciated than when it is remembered.

Silted-up residues of the years smouldered uninterruptedly—and not without melancholy—in the maroon brickwork of these medieval closes: beyond the cobbles and archways of which (in a more northerly direction) memory also brooded, no less enigmatic and inconsolable, among water-meadows and avenues of trees: the sombre demands of the past becoming at times almost suffocating in their insistence.

I wondered whether he was trying to return to a place that no longer existed. Isn't that always the case when we try to go home again?

Sometimes it is better to imagine the past than to remember it.

cryptomnesia (lit. hidden memory) – that although he had lost all conscious recollection of Binet's work, it had none the less borne fruit in his personal unconscious.