Quotes About Memory

The huge, dark wall of loneliness is around him now. It encloses and presses in upon him, and he cannot escape. And the cancerous plant of memory is feeding at his entrails, recalling hundreds of forgotten faces and ten thousand vanished days, until all life seems as strange and insubstantial as a dream.

And he knew that he would never come again, and that lost magic would not come again. Lost now was all of it - the street, the heat, King's Highway, and Tom the Piper's son, all mixed in with the vast and drowsy murmur of the Fair, and with the sense of absence in the afternoon, and the house that waited, and the child that dreamed.

O mortal and perishing love, born with this flesh and dying with this brain, your memory will haunt the earth forever.

Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never forget.

A gracious friend from us is gone, A voice we loved is fled, But faith and memory lead us on: He lives; he is not dead.

For it is so with time and memory: the seed of our deepest feeling is buried under the rush of a momentary and violent one, there is in all feeling a quality of deception and evasion, and the meanings of the spirit become evident only in the light of a dispassionate distance

And so incessant, it seemed to him later, had been this tyranny of strength, that in his young wild twenties when his great boneframe was powerfully fleshed at last, and he heard about him the loud voices, the violent assertion, the empty threat, memory would waken in him a maniacal anger, and he would hurl the insolent intruding swaggerer from his path, thrust back the hostler, glare insanely into fearful surprised faces and curse them.

For famous men have the whole earth as their memorial: it is not only the inscriptions on their graves in their own country that mark them out; no, in foreign lands also, not in any visible form but in people's hearts, their memory abides and grows. It is for you to try to be like them. Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.

The people made their recollections fit in with their sufferings

the most splendid of sepulchres – not the sepulchre in which their bodies are laid, but where their glory remains eternal in men's minds, always there on the right occasion to stir others to speech or to action. For famous men have the whole earth as their memorial: it is not only the inscriptions on their graves in their own country that mark them out; no, in foreign lands also, not in any visible form but in people's hearts, their memory abides and grows.

Vanità scriverà qui riposa il vecchio Jack.

Pain was a difficult concept to conjure in memory, Hoop had said. Like tasting the best cake ever. Such thoughts only really meant anything when the tasting-or the pain- was happening.

I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.

But in a story I can steal her soul.

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, enveloping and destroying those malignancies that would otherwise consume us.

The town could not talk, and would not listen. How'd you like to hear about the war? he might have asked, but the place could only blink and shrug. It had no memory, therefore no guilt. The taxes got paid and the votes got counted and the agencies of government did their work briskly and politely. It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know.

But in a story, which is a type of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rusack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.

They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak.

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.