Quotes About Memory

After a friend dies young, the story of her life becomes the exposition to a tragedy. This is the central problem of biography.

The episodes all blend together for me, so I don't remember. I can't even remember what I had for breakfast this morning. I always feel I must be such a disappointment to them.

The dead person is not truly dead until the last person who rememebers them dies.

I miss my fox-headed brother. Keeper

I can hear broken edges, failures, a great emptiness where there should be beauty. I can hear a faint, sobbing thread of song, running through the desolution like a tickle of tainted water through a battlefield strewn with corpses. It is all my fault. I cannot remember how or why, but I can feel my guilt in everything I touch.

A feeling in here." She pressed her fist to her chest. "It sweeps you away and robs you of breath, and you know that no matter what happens in the future, this is a moment you're going to remember forever. It's always going to be there, living inside you, and no one can take it away.

The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back.

I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading.

We are ghosts of the people we used to be. -Dickensian, TV Series (2015– ), s01e17

I see it as my job to mourn him until the day I die.

The past is never dead. It is not even past." —WILLIAM FAULKNER

That night both of us were ashamed. Not only showing our masochism but even worse, not being able to really do it well. We made love again in the bathtub and her halfhearted thrashing became a faded memory.

David is very concerned about being remembered. I'm concerned about remembering because, after all, I'm going to be left behind. People we know die all the time and there is really no way to react. What can you do? Freak out every day? David brings memory up all the time. I can see how appalled he is at how little any of us react to AIDS deaths. He's focused a lot of worry on being forgotten.

Like all the living and the dead, I think I see him everywhere, but it is just new versions, young versions of guys like Stan. Most of us seem to be recreated every fifteen years. I see a twenty-year-old me almost once a month, and a twenty-year-old, forty-year-old, sixty-year-old Stan passes by on the street often enough.

She hears the word bell, or orchard, or swallow, and she experiences a strange surprise, like the feel of a coin in the soil. These words make her wistful; they overwhelm her with longing. Not for her orchard, nor the bell in her church, nor the swallows that nest in the eaves of her house. For something else altogether, something she would have forgotten completely. She wonders: Why should these words pierce me, if they are not the remains of a currency I once knew how to spend?

But that's what I mean: you're Ms. Hempel forever. At least to us.

Love doesn't go anywhere when you die, you know. The person passes on, the body withers, but love, it survives.

I thought of you and how you love this beauty, And walking up the long beach all alone I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder As you and I once heard their monotone. Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me The cold and sparkling silver of the sea -- We two will pass through death and ages lengthen Before you hear that sound again with me.

clochards—homeless people who have been living on the same streets for so long that no one can remember a time when they weren't there.

It was only later that I wondered about it and tried to look back. But by then I could only see that there was once a time when we had walked apart; and then a time when we walked together.

For she was the only one, of all of them, to have spared me a pleasant word; and suddenly I longed for time to pass, not for its own sake, but as it would take me back to her.

Did she remember, how we laughed and blushed? 'Pa used to say your face was like the red heart on a playing card--mine, he said, was like the diamond. Do you remember, Helen, how Pa said that?

To forget words, common words, because your habits are so narrow you need only know a hundred hard phrases—stone, soup, comb, Bible, needle, dark, prisoner, walk, stand still, look sharp, look sharp!

It was done the day you took me to that house in Bryanston Square, she said. Or even, the time before that, when you bought me tea. We stood in the sun, and you closed your eyes and I looked at your face...I think it was done then, Julia.