Quotes About Memory

My work is to inhabit the silences with which I have lived and fill them with myself until they have the sounds of brightest day and the loudest thunder. And then there will be no room left inside of me for what has been except as memory of sweetness enhancing what can and is to be.

The generation gap is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memory of the community, nor ask the all important question, Why? This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread.

Death folds the corners of my mouth into a heart-shaped star. It sits on my tongue like a stone around which your name blossoms distorted. — Audre Lorde, from "Speechless," The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde . (W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition February 17, 2000)

hadto honor Uncle Vernon's memory.

Allt kan ske, allt är möjligt och sannolikt. Tid och rum existera icke; på en obetydlig verklighetsgrund spinner inbillningen ut och väver nya mönster: en blandning av minnen, upplevelser, fria påhitt, orimligheter och improvisationer.

Nos asombramos de no haber envejecido desde la última vez que nos vimos.

but I so often forget what I know! QUARANTINE

Men så uppdök minnet om gamla fäderneförmaningar och råd, och då framkom den gamla lögnen, att allt arbete är lika aktningsvärt och förehöll honom hans högmod, och så tog han sitt förnuft till fånga och gick hem för att skriva 48 verktum Ulrika Eleonora.

From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of the gods and only guessing at their faces, they arrive dazed and stunned, their heart kicking in their chest with a song worth singing.

Turn off the light, she says as she walks away, creating a small woosh that smells sweet and chemical. It makes me sad because it's the smell she makes when she's leaving.

The past doesn't haunt us, we haunt the past.

Because all of us are made not only of what we have but what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition.

The events of the past cannot be fully understood when you are the only element of the past actively engaged in reliving it.

Despite evidence to the contrary, I hated drinking to the point that I misplaced really big slabs of time.

When I was ten years old, I realized I'd been kidnapped as a toddler. Of course, I would have to have been a fairly dim child to miss the clues. Great big pink-elephant clues, trumpeting and lumbering and shitting through the house, ignored by everyone except me.

Memorization is not the same as remembering.

The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We

He, too, stood looking at her for a moment--and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning...

Then she remembered.

and he said her name to fill the space of five years.

There were things in my past which I have not liked. But all the things of which I was proud will remain.

Es cierto que la Internacional clama que «Hagamos tabla rasa del pasado» y que Mao se comparaba a un poeta genial que caligrafiaba sobre la famosa página en blanco. ¡Como si a una civilización de una antigüedad de varios milenios se la pudiera considerar una página en blanco!

History is written not only by posterity, but for posterity as well.

He wrote Véra sheepishly: "Something has happened (only don't be angry). I can't remember (for God's sake, don't be angry!) I can't remember (promise that you won't be angry), I can't remember your telephone number." He knew it had a seven in it, but the rest had entirely escaped him.