Quotes About Memory

the dead reseave more flowers than the living for regret is stronger than gratitude

Because the forgiven one was always in the wrong. Forgiven didn't mean forgotten.

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, We *told* you not to tell. But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.

I am all the ages I've ever been.

I understood that the man I was calling for could never ever come back. Because I understood that the man that I was calling for was dead.

Look back on your life and find something small that made a big difference.

Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can.

We contain all the ages we have ever been.

And I'd stand there trying to see it, the way you try to remember a dream, where you squint and it's right there on the tip of your psychic tongue but you can't get it back. The image is gone. That is one of the worst feelings I can think of, to have had a wonderful moment or insight or vision or phrase, to know you had it, and then to lose it.

Who knows how much of our stories are true?

I know I set out to tell you every single thing I know about writing, but I am also going to tell you every single thing I know about school lunches, partly because the longings and dynamics and anxieties are so similar. I think this will also show how taking short assignments and then producing really shitty first drafts of these assignments can yield a bounty of detailed memory, raw material, and strange characters lurking in the shadows.

Trauma, which is stored differently in the brain than memory, seeps out of us as warnings of worse to come.

The important things to remember she remembered, she told herself. The rest was chaff, which time would have winnowed out of active memory anyway.

Mankind has a history of forgetting the unpleasant, the undesirable. Bu ignoring its existence, it can make the source of past Terror disappear.

Mankind has a history of forgetting the unpleasant, the undesirable. But ignoring its existence, it can make the source of past Terror disappear.

From the outset, people's experiences of desire and rage, memory and power, community and revolt are inflected and mediated by the institutions through which they find their meaning - and which they, in turn, transform.

History is the poisoned well, seeping into the ground-water. It's not the unknown past we're doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history: an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history.

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.

When I woke, my anguish was specific: the possibility that it was as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them; that I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, startling them awake in their black beds.

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue.

There was no energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy.

History is the love that enters us through death.

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers.