Quotes About Memory

On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha's letters. Then he burned the two photographs.

It had no memory, therefore no guilt

He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn't help it.

The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories. Not bloody stories, necessarily. Happy stories, too, and even a few peace stories.

He enjoyed not being dead. Lying there, Kiowa admired Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's capacity for grief. He wanted to share the man's pain, he wanted to care as Jimmy Cross cared. And yet when he closed his eyes, all he could think was Boom-down, and all he could feel was the pleasure of having his boots off and the fog curling in around him and the damp soil and the Bible smells and the plush comfort of night.

What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. […]And afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

But listen. Even that story is made up. I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

I'm young an happy. I'll never die. 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.

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.

A handsome kid, really. Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms.

The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

Some days I can go nearly an hour without thinking of the taste of your mouth.

And if the air is chilly she feels it - in fact, if you put your hand on her arm you would know she still remembers how touching changed the weather, how a hand skimming the wrist was once a window opening onto a better season where people did better things than be lonely, where the wind was a river of candlelight pushing the blue silhouettes of trees.

I remember holding you against the sink, with the sun soaking the window, the soft call of your hips, and the intricate flickers of thought chiming your eyes. Your mouth, like a Saturday.

so she stays there remembering the warmth of honey between her toes, with her blood not humming, with the sound of the name almost always coming to her.

I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living

What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened?

The occupants of memory have to be protected from strangers.

When Mrs Ross asked him what he was thinking of, he shrugged. But he was thinking of the time he'd climbed the steeple of a church when he was ten-and had seen, for the very first time, the world spread out around him like a gift.

Mourning the loss of a friend and teacher was both fitting and honorable, but to dwell unnecessarily on that loss was to give the past too much power over the present.

For if one is remembered by a friend, one is never truly gone. —

I did not refer to the legends themselves," Thrawn said, turning his glowing eyes on her. "But what is remembered says a great deal about those doing the remembering.

what is remembered says a great deal about those doing the remembering." For