Quotes About Memory

but as an Indian, I find it far easier to forgive than to forget.

We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely developed sense of history and historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on our foreheads, and the mud of the future on our feet.

One cannot take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge

May you never forget what is worth remembering or remember what is best forgotten.

These were the red hours of the conflict, hours no man who survived them would forget, even in his sleep, forever after. Fighting thus at arm's length across that parapet, they were caught up in a waking nightmare, although they were mercifully spared the knowledge, at the outset, that it was to last for another sixteen unrelenting hours.

sturdy five-foot-ten frame—but that was in another country, and alas… "What's that you've got in your hand?" he snapped at me. I glanced down at the piece of paper

Once we're grown, all we can hear are what the poet described: the echoes, dying.

One listened and one remembered. I listened as best I could, but there were no hooks in my head to hang much of it on.

I remember when people used to think I was smart. I remember when people used to think my brain was useful. Damaged by water, sure. And ready to seizure at any moment. But still useful, and maybe even a little bit beautiful and sacred and magical.

So I wonder: Will a person who has drowned, Or almost drowned, always feel Like they're drowning, Even after they've been saved?

How do you talk to the real person whose ghost has haunted you? How do you tell the difference between the two?

But a person can be genocided-can have every connection to his past severed- and live to be an old man whose rib cage is a haunted house built around his heart.

But none of them laughed as hard about my beautiful brain as I knew my father would have. I miss him, the drunk bastard. I would always feel closest to the man who had most disappointed me.

At what point do we just re-create the people who have disappeared from our lives?

I can't remember how to cry.

but I know somebody must be thinking about us because if they weren't we'd just disappear just like those Indians who used to climb the pueblos. Those Indians disappeared with food still cooking in the pot and air waiting to be breathed and they turned into birds or dust or the blue of the sky or the yellow of the sun. There they were and suddenly they were forgotten for just a second and for just a second nobody thought about them and then they were gone.

she braided my sister's hair with hands that smelled deep roots buried in the earth she told me the old stories how time never mattered when she died they gave me her clock

She wanted to find a way to love them in death, because she forgot how to love them in life.

Mary was a bright and shining star," Mr. P said. "And then she faded year by year until you could barely see her anymore.

My memory is strange that way. I often remember people I've never met and events and places I've never seen. I don't think I'm some mystical bastard. I just think I pay attention to the details.

And the tombstone will never answer. Because the dead have only the voices we give to them.

More and more, he heard his spine playing stick games through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.

You're always making up stuff from the past," she said. "And the stuff you imagine is always better than the stuff that actually happened.

I often wonder why I am the one who remember all the pain?