Quotes About Memory

The sound of his boots Ã¢â'¬Â¦ It would pass. The occupation would end. There would be peace, blessed peace. The war and the tragedy of 1940 would be no more than a memory, a page in history, the names of battles and treaties children would recite in school, but as for me, for as long as I live, I will never forget the low, regular sound of those boots pacing across the floorboards.

también se viste y se acicala a los muertos, destinados a pudrirse en la tierra. Es un último homenaje, la suprema prueba de amor hacia quien nos fue querido.

Tutti e due pensavano ai giovani – i loro fratelli, i loro amici – le cui ossa erano in decomposizione sotto terra, nelle innumerevoli fosse comuni. Loro, i sopravvissuti, adesso lo sapevano, di essere mortali. È una lezione che di solito si impara da adulti, ma quelli che hanno dovuto apprenderla a vent'anni non la scordano più. Ah, com'era importante affrettarsi a respirare, baciare, bere, fare l'amore!

She could feel a bell-shaped pink flower brushing her lips. Later, she would remember that while they were stretched out on the ground, a small white butterfly was lazily flitting from one flower to another. Finally she heard a voice whisper, "It's over; they're gone." She stood up and automatically brushed the dust from her skirt. No one, she thought, had been hurt. But after walking for a few minutes, they saw the first fatalities: two men and a woman.

philosophers have warned us: if we forget the past, we are doomed to repeat

One historian has estimated that if the dead from Nanking were to link hands, they would stretch from Nanking to the city of Hangchow, spanning a distance of some two hundred miles. Their blood would weigh twelve hundred tons, and their bodies would fill twenty-five hundred railroad cars. Stacked on top of each other, these bodies would reach the height of a seventy-four-story building.

Nostalgic longing is always for an elsewhere. Remembrance is the affirmation of what brought us here.

To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.

Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms simple and calm and blessed which we saw once in a pure, clear light being pure ourselves.

But one must do something about the past. It doesn't just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.

His heart ached in such a familiar way, and the very familiarity of it pained him.

Tell her I was young once and star-bright Who am now invisible . . .

Odd I should have said those words before and forgotten them. It makes one feel that human beings are just machines after all.

You can't kiss me and vanish.

One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.

I am just a past with no present.

This figure, which I had so vaguely, idly, noticed before was now utterly changed in my eyes. The whole world was its background. And between me and it there hovered, perhaps for the last time, the vision of a slim long-legged girl with gleaming thighs. I ran.

It had occurred, it had happened , and could never in his life be unhappened, never removed, a huge deadly black scar lasting forever.

Here memory was simply a cold cloud to be shuddered at.

Mercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.

But people have their own troubles and tend to forget. One is not all that interesting. Even Hitler is being forgotten at last.

Who is one's first love? Who indeed.

Only sometimes at night when I think that you live now and are somewhere, I shed tears.

I must think of him as vanished utterly and gone forever.