Quotes About Memory

Good bye may seem forever. Farewell is like the end, but in my heart is the memory and there you will always be.

The Real War Will Never Get in the Books. And so good-bye to the war.

So here I sit in the early candle-light of old age—I and my book—casting backward glances over our travel'd road.

I lie and am lied to, but the result of my lie is mental leaps, memory, knowledge.

Rocks are the key to Earth history, because solids remember but liquids and gases forget.

Every place that I have lived haunts me. I always feel like I was never attentive enough and that I missed something, when in reality it's so much more, I missed volumes.

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.

Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.

The work of memory collapses time.

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgment that the church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity.

The emancipatory gift of YHWH to Israel is contrasted with all the seductions of images. The memory of the exodus concerns the God of freedom who frees.

Moses knows that prosperity breeds amnesia.

Our consumer culture is organized against history. There is a depreciation of memory and a ridicule of hope, which means everything must be held in the now, either an urgent now or an eternal now.

I have failed Drill told Memory. You knew the odds were long, Memory said. You knew that in negotiations with species this backward there have only been a handful of successes, and hundreds of failures.

How soon human beings forget what a privilege it is to live in freedom. A privilege, not an honor. An honor would mean we deserved it. We do not.

By putting the dead Germans in the focus of the picture, and by omitting to mention the French dead, a very special view of the battle was built up. It was a view designed to neutralize the effects of German territorial advances and the impression of power which the persistence of the offensive was making.

But legends are part of great events, and if they help keep alive the memory of gallant self-sacrifice, they serve their purpose.

The dead are alive and the living are buried by them.

Der Ruhm mag schwinden, aber die Vergessenheit währt ewig.

Ist es nicht absurd, dass einem die Erinnerung an gute Zeiten viel eher die Tränen in die Augen treibt als die an schlechte?

Mein Gedächtnis funktioniert wie ein Spinnennetz. Die unwichtigen Dinge - wie etwa den Wind - läßt es durch, aber die gefangenen Fliegen bleiben hängen und werden so lange gelagert, bis die Spinne Verstand sie benötigt und tilgt" (S. 398).

Sich daran zu erinnern, wo das Erinnerungsvermögen liegt, das kann einem auch nur in einem cerebralen Cortex passieren.

No one who writes a good book is really dead.