Quotes About Memory

Of course, in response to any question about their own country - such as when their first satellite, Kwangmyongsong-I, was launched into space (an event much boasted about by the DPRK, although the rest of the world deemed it a failure) - they all shouted out the exact date and year.

For those of us raised by mothers and fathers who experienced such trauma firsthand, it is impossible not to continue this remembering. I

When I visited either of the two Koreas I always imagined that I was traveling back to my roots and would discover new truths about my past. Now it occurred to me that the past I was seeking had for many years been buried under and overtaken by American and Chinese influences. The Korea of my imagination existed only in paintings, history books, the memories of older generations, and in the remnants that I glimpsed, every now and then, like shards of glass poking out from the buried past.

But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.

Matt looked up kids from his high school class. Only three were listed as dead, but a bunch were listed as missing/presumed dead. As a test, he looked us up, but none of our names were on any of the lists. And that's how we know we're alive this Memorial Day.

But today when I am 17 and warm and well fed, I'm keeping this journal for myself so I can always remember life as we knew it, life as we know it, for a time when I am no longer in the sunroom.

But today, when I am 17 and warm and well fed, I'm keeping this journal for myself so I can always remember life as we knew it, life as we know it, for a time when I am no longer in the sunroom.

already starting to forget what normal life felt like, clocks

one must forget the past—more accurately, one must remember the necessity of forgetting.

having tried and failed to invent a better future for himself, in the end he invented a better past"178

So perhaps it was her grief I felt as I gazed on this child not mine, and not even much of a child anymore. Grief not for him, nor for Martha exactly, but for all my lost selves, which I liked to imagine were still somehow there, waiting for my return. But those selves were long gone. I would never be younger again. This was so simple it went without saying, but unsaid, one could try to forget it.

Obsession is an accidental haunting, by a person not aware she's a ghost. I knew Sarah was my ghost, but she'd forgotten I even existed.

It's a mistake to think that if we don't remember or don't acknowledge painful experiences they will just disappear. In fact, great damage is done to us by those phantoms and pieces of memories that swim around in the unconscious, the part of us that never forgets. Unpleasant experiences gain power over us by being denied or hidden, but they can be made to relinquish that power when they are brought out in the open.

I was forced to live through it all, every minute and then every day thereafter...

It's fine. I hardly think about it now. It's long gone. Yet there is sometimes the shadow of a shadow, and when that happens I wonder if it could come back. And I don't know, because I don't know what caused it in the first place. My ohysche was turned inside out and shaken, but they never got to the bottom of why.

I had changed, and gone on changing, but I did not fully remember how it had begun, or understand why.

I have always believed that places with a long history, especially those in which terrible events have taken place, retain something of those times, some trace in the air.

The next question is: How will you remember what the client tells you? There are many schools of thought:

She'd been so hopeful that people would forget her.

Did you bring your camera?" Gracie grabbed her trusty Polaroid from under her arm and held it out. Light from the streetlamp glinted off the narrow lens.

Men get over things. Women remember forever.

Ah, but what is history? Is it a record of what happened or rather our interpretation of what happened?" "I think it's both," I answer. "It has to be both. What good is remembering an event if you don't remember how it made you feel. How it impacted others. How it made them feel. You would learn nothing and neither would anyone else.

to take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.