Quotes About Memory

She'd thought she was memorable. How clear it was that she was not. It wasn't a quality you possessed, she thought now. It was a quality other people endowed you with.

He'd taught her something tonight. Taught her almost painlessly. Almost. She'd thought she was memorable. How clear it was that she was not. It wasn't a quality you possessed, she thought now. It was a quality other people endowed you with. She felt small, and foolish, exposed.

think that for others in my family, who didn't see him at the end, who didn't witness his slow decline, he may live intact in memory, much as he was before his illness. I hope so. But that isn't true for me. It was in part to exorcise my final haunting images of my father that I wanted to look at, to explain, the way he fragmented and lost himself in his illness; and who he was before

Dylan Thomas, 'Fern Hill

You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.

Place a beehive on my grave And let the honey soak through. When I'm dead and gone, That's what I want from you. The streets of heaven are gold and sunny, But I'll stick with my plot and a pot of honey. Place a beehive on my grave And let the honey soak through.

She said it again, I'm tired. She wanted me to tell her it was all right, to get her spirit and go on, but I couldn't say it. I told her, Course you're tired. You worked hard your whole life. That's all you did was work. Don't you remember me for that. Don't you remember I'm a slave and work hard. When you think of me, you say, she never belong to those people. She never belong to nobody but herself. She closed her eyes. You remember that. I will, mauma.

When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.

From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.

You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind. From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac .

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

The moment she lifted me, I was wrapped in her smell. The scent got laid down in me in a permanent way and had all the precision of cinnamon.

stories must be told, if they are not told, they die. then we forget who we are and why we are here

My first and only memory of my mother was the day she died.

It's my earliest memory: arranging my brother's marbles into words. It is summer, and I am beneath the oak that stands in the back corner of the work yard. Thomas, ten, whom I love above all the others, has taught me nine words: SARAH, GIRL, BOY, GO, STOP, JUMP, RUN, UP, DOWN. He has written them on a parchment and given me a pouch of forty-eight glass marbles with which to spell them out, enough to shape two words at a time.

I could no more pretend I didn't have a mother than the sea could pretend it had no salt. My mother existed for me with a vengeance. Sometimes her voice would come piping through my bones and practically lift me off my feet.

But I would tell Mother none of this. Nor would I tell her that at the hour of his death, I was floating free in the ocean, in a solitude I would remember all of my life, the gulls cawing over my head and the white flag flying at the top of the pole.

Charleston had a case of the grandeurs. Up till I was eight or so, I thought the grandeurs was a shitting sickness. Missus was a short

Every time it happened, it was like coming upon an empty room I didn't know was there, and stepping in, I would be pierced by it, by the ghost of the one who'd once filled it up. I didn't stumble into this place much anymore, but when I did, it hollowed out little pieces of my chest.

It occurs to me that perhaps the memories most likely to resonate do not fall happenstance into our lives. They are created.

I wondered how it was possible I had found words out there in the world but could lose them in the house where I was born--Sarah Grimke

Already his features had dimmed a little in my mind. It terrified me, this slow disappearing.

I'd always taken my hope from mauma and she was gone.

all roads converge on a single moment on June 25, 1950. For those of her generation who lost somebody, life is forever divided between before that day and after.