Quotes About Memory

Remembering what you want about the past, even if it's not entirely true, keeps you from giving up on the present.

The past hadn't been erased just because a new future had been handed it.

It's as if the body is a candle and the soul is its flame. When the flame is snuffed out, all that is left to prove that there had been a flame is the candle, and even that we only have for a little while. Even the candle is not ours to keep. And yet how we care for that candle for that stretch of time that it is still ours! How we want to remember the shape and fragrance of the little flame it held.

We moved wordlessly from one room to another, from the room of the dead to the room where time lay in pages everywhere I looked.

But it also seemed that every time I shared Edward's story with someone, his hold on me diminished a little. And I didn't want him to disappear from me; I had so little of him to hold on to.

What's there to remember if not the good things?

Henrietta might have said.

The picture of her on that sofa with Kat sitting next to her on a blanket with Sarah in her lap is a beautiful image I know I will always remember.

I knew I would need a place to make sense of what I had lost and yet never had.

After she was gone there would be no one who knew the whole of her life. She did not even know the whole of it! Perhaps she should have written some of it down...but really what would have been the point in that? Everything passed, she would too. This perspective offered her an unexpected clarity she nearly enjoyed, but even with this new clarity the world offered no more explanation for itself than it ever had.

She rolled herself back so she wouldn't leave anything out. Sometimes time spread out like ink in water but it also had an order and one thing could not come without the other coming first.

Public memory: what every half-educated member of a culture knows in her sinews, for it seeped into them in ways she can hardly remember.

How we remember the past constrains the possibilities we consider for the future.

As Cummings pointed out when the museum opened in 2014, there are more Holocaust museums in the United States than in Israel, Germany, and Poland combined, but not one devoted to slavery.

The stumbling stones document what larger memorials cannot show: that the terror began not in far-off Poland, but in the heart of a city full of clubs and cafés, spaces where you can still buy a lottery ticket or go to the dentist. Each four-inch square recalls an ordinary human being, in the midst of her life, who was deported and murdered with little notice and no protest from the other ordinary human beings who surrounded her every day. The terror was here.

What is certain: it's good that those deeds have been marked and preserved. Imagine a world where the greatest crimes ever committed were consigned to dust. Where nothing acknowledged racist terror of any kind—the Holocaust, the genocides, the lynchings were left without a trace. Whatever helps us escape oblivion is welcome.

Forget the past and move on isn't even helpful in the realms of individual psychology; as political advice, it is worthless. When pasts fester, they become open wounds.

My ace in the hole as a human being used to be my capacity for remembering birthdays. I worked at it. Whenever I made a new friend, I made a point of finding out his or her birthday early on, and I would record it in my Filofax calendar.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit broken, the memory darkened?

In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned.

I was losing her. I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it.

The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If

My mother imbued me with a love of libraries. The reason why I finally embraced this book project—wanted, and then needed, to write it—was my realization that I was losing her. I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit