Quotes About Memory

To the truly old, time was as thin as air, a keening and destructive wind that erased their pasts and attacked their memories.

Do you ever think about all the knowledge we pour into our brains and how soon they will turn into mush in the grave? I think about it.

If you are gone [from your homeland] for fifteen years, you will not return. Even if you return, you will not return.

History is not the glory of the winners, it is the weapon of the losers

I did not have enough courage to go round to the back of the villa. I should certainly have been noticed by someone. Why in spite of this, did I have the feeling of having been there already–a long time ago? Don't we infact know in advance all the landscapes we see in our life? Can anything occur that is entirely new, that in depths of our being, we have not anticipated for a long time?

For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone dead messages like wooden rosary beads.

The books we read in childhood don't exist anymore; they sailed off with the wind, leaving bare skeletons behind. Whoever still has in him the memory and marrow of childhood should rewrite these books as he experienced them.

One imagined these barrel organs, beautifully painted, carried on the backs of little grey old men, whose indistinct faces, corroded by life, seemed covered by cobwebs – faces with watery, immobile eyes slowly leaking away, emaciated faces as discoloured and innocent as the cracked and weathered bark of trees, and now like bark smelling only of rain and sky.

I know the name of your seventh-grade Texas History teacher." When the Texan expresses skepticism that this could be possible, you smile and say, "Coach.

My dad's not here, but he's watching in heaven.

Laws die, but Books never.

Best followed now is this life, by hurrying, like itself, to a close. Few things remain. He was repulsed in efforts after a pension by certain caprices of law. His scars proved his only medals. He dictated a little book, the record of his fortunes. But long ago it faded out of print--himself out of being--his name out of memory. He died the same day that the oldest oak on his native hills was blown down.

En el interior afectaban el alma, especialmente cuando llegaban las horas calladas y suaves del ocaso; entonces, la memoria formaba sus cristales igual que el claro hielo suele formarse de crepúsculo sin ruido.

Why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumour of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city.

It was in the summer of 1842

All the corpses must be brought back from the work site for the evening roll call, since the count of living and dead has to match the number of men who left in the morning, to establish that nobody has escaped Auschwitz except by dying.

The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time...

This is what seems to me the grave, perhaps the gravest, evil of our time. For history is always somewhat false, and by its falsehood always somewhat warps judgment; but history written on the basis of deliberate falsehood and of repeated and prolonged suppression would be another matter altogether. It would not be history at all. Now history is the memory of the race; and a man without memory is no longer a man.

He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.

And overpowered by memory Both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely For man - killing Hector, throbbing, crouching Before Achilles' feet as Achilles wept himself, Now for his father, now for Patroclus once again And their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.

out of sight,out of mind

Nay if even in the house of Hades the dead forget their dead, yet will I even there be mindful of my dear comrade.

By hook or by crook this peril too shall be something that we remember

If a man is cruel by nature, cruel in action, the mortal world will call down curses on his head while he is alive, and all will mock his memory after death. But then if a man is kind by nature, kind in action, his guests will carry his fame across the earth and people all will praise him from the heart.