Quotes About Memory

Two statements about the nature of the gospels are crucial for grasping the historical task: (1) They are a developing tradition. (2) They are a mixture of history remembered and history metaphorized.

William Sloane Coffin said when his son Alex died in a car wreck at the age of twenty-four. Ten days later, Coffin delivered Alex's eulogy at Riverside Church in New York City, where he was senior minister. Among many other things, he said this:

Amicitiae nostrae memoriam spero sempiternam fore

Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered.

A mental stain can neither be blotted out by the passage of time nor washed away by any waters.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

Some people will say that memory fades away as the years pass. Of course it does if you don't exercise it or aren't very bright to begin with. -- How to grow old: ancient wisdom for the second half of life.

For walk where we will, we tread upon some story.

It is strong proof of men knowing things before birth, that when mere children they grasp innumerable facts with such speed as to show that they are not then taking them in for the first time, but are remembering and recalling them.

El pasado es también el presente y el futuro. La nación que olvida está pérdida.

Vita enim mortuorum in memoria est posita vivorum.

Finally, an orator must have a keen mind capable of remembering a vast array of relevant precedents and examples from history, along with a thorough knowledge of the law and civil statutes.

We forget our pleasures, we remember our sufferings

I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

I wish I didn't have to think about you. You wanted to impress me; well, I'm not impressed, I'm disgusted...You wanted to make damn good and sure I'd never be able to turn over in bed again without feeling that body beside me, not there but tangible, like a leg that's been cut off. Gone but the place still hurts.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?

Where do the words go when we have said them?

There's blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.

She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.

at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; your private dinosaurs; the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.