Quotes About Memory

They are not dead who live in the hearts they leave behind-Tuscarora

Reminds me of the red dress you wore the first time I had you. That was it for me, you know. You devastated me. There was no coming back from that.

One day at a time. You rise, you eat, you bathe, and you talk to the few people you can tolerate while feeling so wretched. Over time, it hurts a little less. Then a little less. And so on...Until one morning, you will awake and realize the pain is only a memory. It will always be with you, but it will eventually lack the power to cripple you.

Must've been some lay for her to be so bent out of shape over it. I couldn't say, he muttered. I don't remember. Were you drunk? No. Jesus. He scrubbed at his face. What the hell did she tell you?

murmured, reminding me of the time I'd sung the Sara Bareilles anthem

It would be another scar to add his collection, another bitter memory he'd always have, a memory I would share and fear along with him, but it wouldn't rule us. We wouldn't let it.

At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. --from Daddy, written 12 October 1962

Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.

The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses. Save them for my funeral, I'd said.

I used to pray to recover you. --from Daddy, written 12 October 1962

The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.

I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. --From the poem Mad Girl's Love Song

It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.

I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.) I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

I said: I must remember this, being small.

I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. I pick it up, exile that I am, like the purple 'lucky stones' I used to collect with a white ring all the way round, or the shell of a blue mussel with its rainbowy angel's fingernail interior; and in one wash of memory the colors deepen and gleam, the early world draws breath.

They would grow old. They would forget me.

I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.

God, I scream for time to let go, to write, to think. But no. I have to exercise my memory in little feats just so I can stay in this damn wonderful place which I love and hate with all my heart. And so the snow slows and swirls, and melts along the edges. The first snow isn't good for much. It makes a few people write poetry, a few wonder if the Christmas shopping is done, a few make reservations at the skiing lodge. It's a sentimental prelude to the real thing. It's picturesque & quaint.

The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. [...] The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms.

But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Sometimes I wondered if I had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been through, and carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose.

You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy.