Quotes About Memory

The other thing I know now, is that we survive grief merely and surely by outlasting it. The ongoing fact of the narrative eclipses the heartbreak within. A deal that seems to be the price we pay for getting to hold on to our beloved dead.

God is love and love is memory, and memory is a bruise or a warmth or a grocery list you cannot bear to throw away.

YESTERDAY I FOUND a note I had written to myself, in the piles of outlines and narrative maps that are a writer's building blocks. "Let Her Die," I had written at the top of a legal pad, a shorthand reminder to get to that part of the story. Then I saw it the next day and half gasped; for a moment it was as though someone else had given me this instruction. Let her die: a three-word definition of the arc of grief if ever I heard one, and it takes a long time.

In the dream I knew she was dead, and I reached out for her and said, "But you're coming back, right?" She smiled but shook her head; her face was a well of sadness.

I can't forget. I can't really forgive. But I can live. Live with it.

After all the human noise and conflicts have stopped, the absent person has more room in your heart to spread out and be herself. My mother's been gone ten years and I know her much better now than when we saw each other every day.

When the water boiled, Michiko poured it into the pot of green leaves and we both waited in the thick silence. I felt strangely calmed by this simple ritual I had seen my mother do many hundred times before. It was all that seemed to make sense in this place and I held on to it as if I were drowning.

Every so often I was overwhelmed by a phantom pain that cut through me like a knife. I was certain that if I looked down I would find blood all over, like the knife I once held in my hands, but it was all in my mind.

He has joined the great majority.

Among intellectual pursuits, one of the most useful is the recording of past events.

And forever, O my brother, hail and farewell!

In the half darkness we look at each otherand smileand touch arms across his little, startlingly muscled body—this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,sleeper only the mortal sounds can awake,this blessing love gives again into our arms.

I come out of the home for the aged, get on my bicycle, and think to myself that even if there is a communal grave it will in future not be of archaeological significance. Nevertheless, I have finally visited my deceased maternal grandmother who once bought me a spinning top.

Mas luego a la memoria se m'ofrece aquella noche tenebrosa, escura, que siempre aflige esta anima mezquina con la memoria de mi desventura: verte presente agora me parece en aquel duro trance de Lucina; y aquella voz divina, con cuyo son y acentos a los airados vientos pudieran amansar, que agora es muda, me parece que oigo, que a la cruda, inexorable diosa demandabas en aquel paso ayuda; y tú, rústica diosa, ¿dónde estabas?

Y aun no se me figura que me toca aqueste oficio solamente en vida, mas con la lengua muerta y fría en la boca pienso mover la voz a ti debida; libre mi alma de su estrecha roca, por el Estigio lago conducida, celebrando t'irá, y aquel sonido hará parar las aguas del olvido.

So as far as chests go, whatever you're going to have there, you'll have there. In time. Sub-nubbins, nubbins, boopers, or super-droopers." I made her repeat the categories until I had committed them to memory.

Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present. In order to reach any kind of success in automobile racing, a driver must never remember.

When a dog dies, his soul is released to run until he is ready to be reborn

The smell would have given me an erection if I'd still had testicles.

To remember is to disengage from the present

What can I do but force myself to remember? Try to imprint what I know on my soul, a thing that has no surface, no sides, no pages, no form of any kind. Carry it so deeply in the pockets of my existence that when I open my eyes and look down at my new hands with their thumbs that are able to close tightly around their fingers, I will already know. I will already see.

Memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

To remember is to leave the present.

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