Quotes About Memory

A land which does not remember its history can never learn the lessons of its past.

When I'm Gone Just Carry On

all photographs are about death, really, and time: about preserving a moment in silver and chemicals, when life itself is never preserved, when every cell of everything is already decaying, and being replaced, and decaying again. The subject and the image coexist for the moment that the shutter opens and closes. And then the subject decays but the image lives on unchanged.

Mais je veux me rappeler. Je veux me rappeler celui que j'ai été et que sont beaucoup d'autres.

Yo, por ejemplo, anticipo mucho y recuerdo poco.

When I look up and see a star, I know my mom is there. She's with me all the time. It's a powerful connection.

If it upsets you better not recall it." --The Chalk Garden, a play by Enid Bagnold, 1953/1956

If it upsets you better not recall it." --from The Chalk Garden

If it upsets you better not recall it.

There is nothing so difficult to remember as sexual love. How often, where, and what happened? It all goes, it has all gone, leaving no impression, mattering so much less than we like to think. (…) What we have had we have had, and, pleased, we pass along. (But what we haven't had may well be a ticklish business!)

If I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.

Selene no ha muerto, vive en el corazón del público que noche a noche le brindó su aplauso...'. Y ese público noble, que cada noche le gritaba mamacita, pelos, enséñame a King Kong, guardaría un minuto de silencio en memoria suya, un minuto de cuarenta segundos que terminaría con un eructo liberador.

Una noche calurosa de mayo, cuando ya andaba a medios chiles, perdí por

Conocía demasiado bien la soledad. Y ahora sería más cruda que antes, pues tendría clavado como un aguijón el recuerdo de la dicha fugaz que había conocido.

Temas: Los de siempre. El pasado ya inalterable, el presente fugitivo, el inexistente futuro.

Deslumbrado y alterado por esa luz, pero también por ser únicamente el doctor Pasavento, quise creer que todo lo que me pasaba era, simple y llanamente, producto de una fuerte resaca. Porque si uno lo pensaba bien, ¿era verosímil que durante toda la noche un médico, sin duda monstruoso, probablemente un neuroquímico del cerebro, me hubiera implantado la memoria de doctor Pasavento?" Doctor Pasavento. Enrique Vila-Matas (Satán Vivo). p. 172.

sin la memoria, sería aún más angustiosa la vida, aunque tal vez sea aún más angustioso darse cuenta de que cuanto más crece nuestra memoria, más crece nuestra muerte. Porque el hombre no es más que una máquina de recordar y de olvidar que camina hacia la muerte. Y no digo esto con tristeza porque también es cierto que la memoria, disfrazándose de vida, convierte la muerte en algo sutil y tenue.

We, all of us, wish to rescue, via memory, each fragment of life that suddenly comes back to us, however unworthy, however painful it may be. And the only way to do this is to set it down in writing.

El pasado, decía Proust, no sólo es fugaz, es que no se mueve de sitio. Con París pasa lo mismo, jamás ha salido de viaje. Y encima es interminable, no se acaba nunca.

I know every note in every song, the whole history of it, even parts that were there and are gone.

Even as a political religion, therefore, Zionism is a phenomenon sui generis. It effects a fusion between the secularization of an old messianism (the return to Eretz Israel) and the sacralization of the memory of a profane historical experience (the extermination of six million Jews).

Enzo Traverso

Adam Grolsch, who had witnessed the Jewish massacre in Pinsk, also witnessed two or three gas vans while he was in Rivne, Ukraine, but their function occurred to him only later:

He was a proud young man who had been called up into the SS, and he was in a concentration camp. The young man simply didn't go along, and he was shot as an SS man. And that was also known to us in our town.