Quotes About Memory

On pillow after pillow lies The wild white hair and staring eyes; Jaws stand open; necks are stretched With every tendon sharply sketched; A bearded mouth talks silently To someone no one else can see. Sixty years ago they smiled At lover, husband, first-born child. Smiles are for youth. For old age come Death's terror and delirium. - Heads in the Women's Ward

I suppose if one lives to be old, one's entire waking life will be spent turning on the spit of recollection over the fires of mingled shame, pain or remorse. Cheerful prospect!

Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses: To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget, That there is always a changing at the root, And a real world in which time really passes. — Philip Larkin, from "New Year Poem," Collected Poems , ed. Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989)

Truly, though our element is time, We are not suited to the long perspectives Open at each instant of our lives. They link us to our losses: worse, They show us what we have as it once was, Blindly undiminished, just as though By acting differently we could have kept it so. — Philip Larkin, from "Reference Back," The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin , ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)

Behind the glass, underneath the cellophane, remains your final summer – sweet And meaningless, and not to come again.

What will survive of us is love.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

Cattle die, kindred die, we ourselves shall die, but I know one thing that never dies: the reputations of each one dead.

What actually happened in the past is gone- history is our attempt to reconstruct the past from the evidence that remains.

And again that strange half-memory brushed mothlike against the Stalker's mind, the Once-born called Tom kneeling over it in snow and saying, "Miss Fang! It's not fair! He waited until you were dazzled!" For a moment it felt an odd satisfaction, as though it had returned a favor.

Ni ska bli en del av historien, eftersom historia är allt ni bryr er om.

How should I remember the child's name? It was fifteen, sixteen years ago and I have never liked babies; nasty creatures, leak at both ends and have no respect for ceramics.

She wanted to stop, but she was riding a wave of memory and it was carrying her backward to that night, that room, and the blood that had spattered her mother's star charts like the map of a new constellation.

The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.

Christians who like to write might do as a description of the genus. But the actual species shared more precise characteristics, including intellectual vivacity, love of death, conservative politics, memories of war, and a passion for beef, beer, and verbal battle.

But I don't forget and I don't forgive.

Nothing stands still, except in our memory.

When you're my age, Tom, you live in the Past a great deal. You remember it; you dream of it.

I know that Thomas consented to this single picture only because he knew (had decided) that it was our last moment together. He smiled so that I could take his smile with me.

He smiled so that I could take his smile with me.

Je sais que Thomas n'a consenti à cette unique photo que parce qu'il avait compris (décidé) que c'était notre dernier moment ensemble. Il sourit pour que j'emporte son sourire avec moi.

His was the first male sex I held in my hand, other than my own. My first kiss was the one he gave me. My first embrace, skin against skin, was with him.

I've seen the wedding pictures, my mother put them in an album. She looks at them regularly, she must like to remember her youth. (Or else she confuses youth with happiness, as people frequently do.)

I want to experience only the moment, not the looming certainty that I will lose that moment, not the certain awareness that, ultimately, this moment must slip from present to past, only the joy of the moment and the graze of memory.