Quotes About Memory

To walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though thoughts and ideas were indeed fixed objects in a landscape one need only know how to travel through. In this way, walking is reading, even when both the walking and reading are imaginary, and the landscape of the memory becomes a text as stable as that to be found in the garden, the labyrinth, or the stations.

We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth.

Memory of joy and liberation can become a navigational tool, an identity, a gift.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present, or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future...Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don't have that memory, and that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans

Woolf disagrees, saying of the home, "For there we sit surrounded by objects which enforce the memories of our own experience.

Nobody gets over anything; time doesn't heal any wounds...the landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it's made out of memory and desire...

The dead must be remembered, but the living are the monument.

People die in this war, but the ideas cannot be erased.

When I recovered the blouse, I lost the memory, for the two were irreconcilable. It vanished in an instant, and I saw it go. Sometimes you hear of murals and miraculously preserved bodies buried, sealed, protected from light for hundreds or thousands of years. Exposed to the fresh air and light for the first time, they begin to fade, crumble, disappear. Sometimes gaining and losing are more intimately related than we like to think.

I think sometimes that I became a historian because I didn't have a history, but also because I was interested in telling the truth in a family in which truth was an elusive entity.

Stepping into the smell of a long-abandoned aple crop, Cameron called towards the house, hoping to catch his mother's attention in the window where she would be sitting working

Once the scent caught me on the street in Greenwich Village. I stopped in my tracks and looked around. Where was it coming from? A shop? The trees? A passerby? I could not tell. I only knew the smell made me cry. I stood on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village as people brushed by, and felt suddenly young and terribly open, as if I were waiting for something. I live in an ocean of smell, and the ocean is my mother.

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers. As {she} sat at the edge of {the lake}, memory blossoms floated unbounded, as though breathed, no words spoken. Like birds that fly across national borders, between countries at war at each other.

hope they remember that when they get older. When they count up the things I did and didn't do. I never gave the drinking a second

at that picture, you would think that no one died. You would think we were happy all the time: my mother, my baby, and

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers. (pg. 174)

Behind me the past was darker than I had known it, not only irrecoverable, but unexplored, unexplorable.

These signs and tokens are of no small value; they speak a universal language and act as a passport to the attention and support of the initiated in all parts of the world. They cannot be lost so long as memory retains its power….

Remarque Erich Maria

Nepat?kam?m atmi??m piemita kut kas labs: t?s atg?din?ja, ka esi bijis laim?gs, ja ar? pirms mirk?a v?l dom?ji, ka t?ds neesi. Laim?gam b?t ir realat?vs j?dziens. Kurš to apjautis reti j?tas gluži nelaim?gs. /The Night in Lisabon/

After a time, it seemed that the world inside the books became my world. So when I thought of my childhood, it was dandelion wine and ice cream on a summer porch, like Ray Bradbury, and catching catfish with Huck Finn. My own memories receded and the book memories became the real memories, far more than the outside, far more even than in here.

She thinks how sad it is that we remember the killers and not their victims. What if the world forgot Hitler and remembered all the names of his victims? What is we immortalized the victims?

For the memory of their time together was all she would ever have in the empty years to come.

Te escribo porque los años me han fijado los recuerdos como un sarro y el pasado se ha convertido para mí en un viejo tullido.