Quotes About Memory

William Faulkner ever said wasn't written in one of his novels, but spoken during an interview in Paris: The past is never dead; it's not even past.

The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and prisms reflected all possible futures. Books are lighthouses erected on the dark sea of time.

Like John Kennedy said, though, 'Forgive thy enemies but remember their names.

Odd what sticks to our memory, sort of an arbitrary choice made by the subconscious.

The Germans have national amnesia where the war is concerned.

There's another, simple, idea that has been shared on the Internet: after buckling a child into a car seat, a driver takes off his or her left shoe and puts it on the back seat. Once they reach their destination, they won't go far without the shoe, and they'll be reminded of the child.

Nothing so terrible can be forgotten. But all she wanted—all the others had wanted—was a chance to get on with their own lives. They deserved and hoped for a chance at being normal. But that was never to be, though in time the headlines would shrink, the interest would ebb. But it could not be completely disregarded. There was always the angle. Always and forever.

Her perpetual despondency preserved forever in black and white.

Shared memories are like jagged puzzle pieces. Sometimes they don't exactly align with complete precision.

She's gone, yes. She'll live on in the people who loved her.

That morning stays in my head like a graphic novel, images telling the story in bold swaths of black and white with smudges of jolting color roaring out of the lines.

in, and while she'd been

It's funny how the most traumatic events that happen to you are always there behind a sometimes-impenetrable memory.

It takes only the mention of a single word to take her back to the unthinkable.

A Union soldier recalled the Confederate dead along Cemetery Ridge: No words can depict the ghastly picture…the men lay in heaps, the wounded wriggling and groaning under the weight of the dead among whom they were entangled….I could not long endure the gory, ghastly spectacle. I found my head reeling, the tears flowing and my stomach sick at the sight. For months the specter haunted my dreams…

A wounded New Hampshire soldier named Drake had the unpleasant sensation of watching as a hog tore the flesh from the bones of his recently amputated leg. It was eaten up before his eyes. He recalled that he could feel a sharp pain very clearly as it happened

September 20, 1963 The telephone jangled him up from a pleasant dream. Something about the war again, but soft and warm and . . . he could remember no more. He sat up. Marthe was already in the bathroom, and the telephone's harsh clamor made him jerk it off the cradle. "Allo?" "Dr. Cohen," a thick German accent said, "I am from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper in—" "I know.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling ,and sewn with rebus threads.Most of the time , the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on .

Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share. But the past for every one of us is a desert island.

almost everyone I've ever loved is dead. And the only way to live with the constant cull of what you love is to take a little of that cold grave into yourself, every time.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and

Sometimes the flashback is so sudden, and so inappropriate to the surrounding circumstance, that the only sane reaction is foolish, uncontrollable laughter.

those words still murmured in the little grey daydream-space where memory meets inspiration.

There were many, so many men and women, beginning with my own mother, whose courage and sacrifice inspired the memory of them.