Quotes About Memory

History is always entirely different to what has happened.

Then suddenly he remembered that he had once intended, as a pastime, to count the wrinkles in his grandmother's face. But now he found that he no longer desired to count them; but they remained close keeping somewhere in his soul, all of them, each and every one.

A new generation forgets the spectres that may have tormented the old.

Forgetting, along with hypocrisy, were, to him, the necessary arts central to living.

How utterly our past suffuses us. We live in all our days at once.

The past looks worse the closer you look at it.

non seulement le passé n'est jamais mort, mais il n'est même pas passé

On the contrary, anyone speaking or writing about concentration camps is still regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned to the world of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with regard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for reality.

Ce n'est ni une question d'intelligence ou de stupidité. Celui qui ne connaît pas le dialogue avec lui-même ne verra aucune difficulté à se contredire luimême, ce qui signifie qu'il ne sera jamais capable de – ni ne voudra - rendre compte de ce qu'il a dit ou fait ; il ne pourra non plus s'inquiéter de commettre quelque crime puisqu'il peut être sûr qu'aussitôt il l'oubliera

We can no more master the past than we can undo it. But we can reconcile ourselves to it. The form for this is the lament, which arises out of all recollection.

The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.

In the eyes of the Jews, thinking exclusively in terms of their own history, the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler, in which a third of the people perished, appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprecedented crime of genocide, but, on the contrary, as the oldest crime they knew and remembered.

But even non-tragic plots become genuine events only when they are experienced a second time in the form of suffering by memory operating retrospectively and perceptively.

Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.

the concept of happiness is present in us through a consciousness that is equated with memory (that is, since happiness is not an "innate" but a remembered idea), this "outside the human condition" actually means before human existence.

It is memory and not expectation (for instance, the expectation of death as in Heidegger's approach) that gives unity and wholeness to human existence.

Augustine asks, how do I remember the "happy life"? He answers: Is it like the way we remember joy? Perhaps so, for even when I am sad, I remember joy, just as when I am miserable, I remember the happy life. But I never saw, or heard, or smelled, or tasted joy with a bodily sense. I experienced it in my mind when I rejoiced and knowledge of it has clung to my memory.

The happy life is not recalled as past, pure and simple, without further relevance for the present. Insofar as the happy life is remembered, it is part and parcel of the present and inspires our desires and expectations for the future. The point about remembering joy when we are sad is that we hope for its eventual return, just as in remembering it while in a state of joy we actually fear that sadness may come back.

Augustine arrives at "the camps and vast palaces of memory."11 There he finds the notion of the "happy life," which is his origin and as such the quintessence of his being. The absolute future turns out to be the ultimate past and the way to reach it is through remembrance.

As Tony Judt wrote a few years ago in The New York Review of Books,8 Arendt made many small errors for which her critics will never forgive her. But she got many of the big things right and for this she deserves to be remembered.

Massa's worden niet overtuigd door feiten, zelfs niet door verzonnen feiten, maar uitsluitend door de consistentie van het systeem waarvan ze menen deel uit te maken. Herhaling - waarvan het belang enigszins overschat wordt, om dat men meestal gelooft dat de massa's weinig of niet in staat zijn om te snappen en te onthouden - is alleen belangrijk omdat ze de maa's overtuigt van de consistentie van de tijd.

Bridget saw her husband look for her and shivered. The memory of how the MacNachtons had dealt with those thieves was still clear in her mind, clear and terrifying. This incident had given the chilling memories credence, ensured that she would not be able to dismiss it all as a bad dream. She now knew exactly what her husband was, what he was capable of. How could she live with that? And, yet, how could she not?

There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world even though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind.

But the past is like a shadow, always trying to catch up.