Quotes About Memory

But where the Jews were concerned, did they talk about that? Many people say that nobody talked about it. They're lying.

Gassed. They were killed, and soap was made from the bones. The people were nothing more than that. Wasn't it especially dangerous to talk about that? It wasn't dangerous.

The movies people don't talk about or remember after six months' time don't really matter.

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it. —Gabriel García Márquez

We all know, either implicitly or explicitly, that all we really have is our place in the memories of others. We exist to the degree that we know and remember one another. Even the most isolated among us. We share a collective understanding that we are all part of a greater whole. Perhaps

All memory is a form of fiction. But all fiction is a form of reality.

Kemal's former opponents in the CUP, all dead by 1930, were resuscitated as heroes in the Turkish national consciousness.

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.1 Emerson

My best moment? I have a lot of good moments but the one I prefer is when I kicked the hooligan

It is a well known fact that Abraham Lincoln spent much of his spare time visiting wounded soldiers in Union Army hospitals. I've spent thirty years teaching history at Columbia and I don't think I've spent more than fifteen minutes in the freshman dorm. Are we the ones keeping Lincoln's memory alive? Or are we burying it?

History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the past.

Two objects are equal only if the variables containing the object references point to the same object.

Speaking activates a different part of the brain. If you're trying to understand something, or increase your chance of remembering it later, say it out loud. Better

I'll remember your apocalypse if you'll remember mine It will be a holiday of the senses

With every step he felt he was losing some part of himself, the way we gradually lose our memory of what we once thought mattered, pulling us faster towards that emptiness in which we are no longer human.

It is raining so the earth has turned mostly to mud, and I think of what the minister said when my brother died: "The rain comes and washes away his prints, so we can move on." I wished for drought instead, so we wouldn't lose every trace, but it rained for a week straight, and despite it being April, three feet of snow landed to make sure the job was done for good.

Most young men and women (...) grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in. This makes historians, whose business it is to remember what others forgot, more essential (...) than ever before.

We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.

Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in permanent evolution.

La distruzione del passato, o meglio la distruzione dei meccanismi sociali che connettono l'esperienza dei contemporanei a quella delle generazioni precedenti, è uno dei fenomeni più tipici e insieme più strani degli ultimi anni del Novecento. La maggior parte dei giovani alla fine del secolo è cresciuta in una sorta di presente permanente, nel quale manca ogni rapporto organico con il passato storico del tempo in cui essi vivono.

Santa might emit a field from his beard that makes people miss him, the elves might have a machine that causes light to bend, or I could have met him and then been convinced by Mrs. Claus to undergo brain surgery that erased my memory.

he never stopped taking photographs, only now it isn't with a camera but mentally.

There is power in remembrance, recalling, and memorial celebration.

when Melanchthon recalled it, although, as we have said, he was not yet in Wittenberg when it happened, and was really only recounting the recollections of others who had been there. So when he did, he was speaking in the way so many of us do when remembering things: we aren't telling an untruth but conflating things in a way that is not perfectly and literally accurate, specifically to make a larger point, and, as good fiction does, to tell a greater truth.