Quotes About Memory

Hi, dumplin'. Where your socks?" Marie seldom called Pecola the same thing twice, but invariably her epithets were fond ones chosen from menus and dishes that were forever uppermost in her mind.

living activity of the dead)

Lying on a ring of onion, a tomato slice exposed its seedy smile, one she remembers to this moment.

The disease they suffered now was a mere inconvenience compared to the devastation they remembered.

though she could remember desire, she had forgotten how it worked; the clutch and helplessness that resided in the hands; how blindness was altered so that what leapt to the eye were places to lie down, and all else—doorknobs, straps, hooks, the sadness that crouched in corners, and the passing of time—was interference.

Home is memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory.

The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well—to tell, to refine and tell again.

A shudder ran through Paul D. A bone-cold spasm that made him clutch his knees. He didn't know if it was bad whiskey, nights in the cellar, pig fever, iron bits, smiling roosters, fired feet, laughing dead men, hissing grass, rain, apple blossoms, neck jewelry, Judy in the slaughterhouse, Halle in the butter, ghost-white stairs, chokecherry trees, cameo pins, aspens, Paul A's face, sausage or the loss of a red, red heart

If you go there—you who was never there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there, waiting for you . . . Even though it's all over—over and done with—it's going to always be there waiting for you.

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. —Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory

It was as though he no longer needed to drink to forget whatever it was he could not remember. Now he could not remember that he had ever forgotten anything. Perhaps that was why for the first time after that old day in France he was beginning to miss the presence of other people. Shadrack had improved enough to feel lonely. If he was lonely before, he didn't know because the noise he kept up, the roaring, the busyness protected him from knowing it.

They held hands and knew that only the coffin would lie in the earth; the bubbly laughter and the press of fingers in the palm would stay aboveground forever.

He had a flattering view of me as someone interesting, capable, witty, smart, high-spirited. I did not share that view of myself, and wondered why he held it. But it was the death of that girl - the one who lived in his head - that I mourned when he died. Even more than I mourned him, I suffered the loss of the person he thought I was.

Fue una sombra la mayor parte de mi vida, una presencia que señalaba su propia ausencia, o tal vez la mía. Quién soy yo sin ella, esa niña desnutrida de ojos tristes que esperan. Cómo temblaba cuando nos escondimos de las paladas. Le tapé la cara, los ojos, con la esperanza de que no hubiera visto el pie que asomaba de la tumba

The fathers may soar, they may triumph, they may leave, but the children know who they are; they remember, half in glory and half in accusation.

There were two rooms and she took him into one of them, hoping he wouldn't mind the fact that she was not prepared; that though she could remember desire, she had forgotten how it worked; the clutch and helplessness that resided in the hands; how blindness was altered so that what leapt to the eye were places to lie down, and all else - doorknobs, straps, hooks, the sadness that crouches in corners, and the passing of time - was interference.

I don't miss you anymore adam rather i miss the emotion that your dying produced a feeling so strong it defined me while it erased you leaving only your absence for me to live in like the silence of the japanese gong that is more thrilling than whatever sound may follow.

Baby Suggs laughed, clear as anything. "You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina? About your daddy? You don't remember nothing about how come I walk the way I do and about your mother's feet, not to speak of her back? I never told you all that? Is that why you can't walk down the steps? My Jesus my." But you said there was no defense. "There ain't." Then what do I do? "Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on.

Some of them had to have Bible verses read to them because they could not decipher print themselves, so they had sharpened the skills of the illiterate: perfect memory, photographic minds, keen senses of smell and hearing.

You can't take a life and walk off and leave it. Life is life. Precious. And the dead you kill is yours. They stay with you anyway, in your mind. So it's a better thing, a more better thing to have the bones right there with you wherever you go. That way, it frees up your mind.

and feel the oldest and most devastating pain there is: not the pain of childhood, but the remembrance of it.

And they might never forget.

Here is the secret to your life as a kingdom woman of excellence: a short memory coupled with a clear direction. If you are going to live in excellence, you have to forget yesterday. Whether it was good, bad, or ugly, if it's yesterday, you need to let it go. When you carry yesterday further than you ought to, you ruin today. If you ruin today, then you spoil tomorrow.

History was a way to live extra lives, to cheat the limits of flesh and blood, to roll the rock back from the tomb and free the resurrected dead.