Quotes About Memory

It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, "Old age is a continuous series of losses." Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: "Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.

One day you're going to remember me and how much I loved you... then you're going to hate yourself for letting me go.

Why is love intensified by absence?

The dead govern the living.

The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We reexperience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.

La tristeza no desaparece, pero la desesperación debe ser contenida, pues no honra al que ha partido.

Las informaciones son archivadas en la memoria, las experiencias quedan clavadas en el corazón.

You have not yet destroyed oral tradition only because it is the one language that cannot be sacked, robbed, repeated, plagiarized, copied. What is spoken remains alive.

The French say that to part is to die a little. To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity.

Things that we hear pass quicker from our minds than what we read.

the day I die will never come tis' that day should be the day I die as I die I shall lie as ashes with the ones I love most

Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.

You write because everything dies, to save what dies.

What she remembers now is not so much happiness as places where happiness occurred. Happiness was intangible, place made it visible.

We were born without memory and we try to complement each other with the presence of the absent.

Nothing improves the memory more than trying to forget.

The written word can be erased - not so with the spoken word.

What we are doing at the moment is more that just one thing added to the rest; it is a memoir.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

Literature, as an institution par excellence of memory and a universally employed mode of human expression, untiringly explores ways of articulating who we are and of understanding both the incommensurability and the interconnectedness of our histories.

I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.

Any single historical event is too complex to be adequately known by anyone. It transcends all the intellectual capacities of men. Our practice is to wait until a sufficient number of details have been forgotten. Of course things seem simpler then! Our memories work that way; we retain the facts which are easiest to think about.

Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.

Charles had not lived. So lately dead that the pain was still the pain of separation and not of total absence, his memory lay against her heart.