Quotes About Memory

Then there was someone else I met, whose face and voice I can't forget, and the memory of her is like a jail I'm trapped inside, or maybe she is something I just use to hold my real life at a distance.

But in the intervening decades, something curious had happened, an act of what psychologists today might term recovered memory. Locals had reclaimed a past of their own , in which Todd County was staunch rebel territory, a pastoral land of Southern belles and brave Confederates. History, like nature, knows no jumps. Robert Penn Warren once wrote. Except the jump backward

Silence over Europe's recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future.

Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation; thus the progress of historical studies is often a danger for national identity . . . The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things'. Ernest Renan

The past was neither as good nor as bad as we suppose: it was just different. If we tell ourselves nostalgic stories, we shall never engage the problems that face us in the present - and the same is true if we fondly suppose that our own world is better in every way. The past really is another country: we cannot go back. However, there is something worse that idealising the past - or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.

Among the speakers at the graveside was Viktor Orbán, the young leader of the Young Democrats, who could not help noting that some of the Communists present at Nagy's reburial were the same who, just a few years before, had so strenuously falsified the very revolution whose praises they were now singing.

A differenza della memoria, che conferma e rafforza se stessa, la storia contribuisce al disincanto. Quasi tutto ciò che ha da offrire è sconfortante, addirittura devastante, il che spiega perché non sia sempre politicamente prudente sbandierare il passato come arma con la quale bastonare un popolo per le sue precedenti colpe. Ma la storia dev'essere imparata, e periodicamente imparata di nuovo.

V následujících letech Izrael znehodnotí, podkopá a nakonec zni?í význam a využitelnost holokaustu a omezí jej na to, co v nÄ›m již dnes pÃ…â"¢iznanÄ› mnoho lidí vidí, totiž izraelskou výmluvu pro vlastní neblahé po?ínání.

However, there is something worse than idealizing the past—or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. Most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive—which is why it is not always politically prudent to wield the past as a moral cudgel with which to beat and berate a people for its past sins.

Schopnost evokovat Hitlera, OsvÄ›tim nebo Mnichov má své pÃ…â"¢ednosti: alespo? se tak sou?asnost dovolává minulosti, místo aby ji zcela ignorovala. Dnes to ?iníme amatérsky a stále více zp?sobem, kterým sami sobÄ› Å¡kodíme, ale aspo? to dÄ›láme. Nemáme se tÄ›chto aktivit vzdát, nýbrž provádÄ›t je s vyÅ¡Å¡í mírou historické informovanosti a vnímavosti.

The history and memory of the Second World War were typically confined to a familiar set of moral conventions: Good versus Evil, Anti-Fascists against Fascists, Resisters against Collaborators and so forth.

Nothing, of course, is ever quite as good as we remember. The social democratic consensus and the welfare institutions of the postwar decades coincided with some of the worst town planning and public housing of modern times. From Communist Poland through

re-surfaced.

Silence over Europe's recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future. Today - in the wake of painful public debates in almost every other European country - it seems somehow fitting (and in any case unavoidable) that Germans, too, should at last feel able openly to question the canons of well intentioned official memory.

My mommy told me If I was goody That she would buy me A rubber dolly My sister told her I kissed a soldier Now she won't buy me That rubber dolly Now I am dead And in my grave And there beside me A rubber dolly

She felt the strangeness of recognizing a place and yet not knowing it, of having a similar tone as if nothing had changed, yet everything had changed and aged, including Violet herself.

Even these thoughts will slip my mind in time. And then..... ...only... ...the beat of my heart still remains.

The best thing we can do for the dead is to do their share of living with a smile. ~Train Heartnet

It hurt, remembering. Hurt because there was so much I'd done, so much I'd yet to do. In so many different ways, I now realized, not remembering had been a blessing. A brief respite in the twisted bloody mess that my life had become. But at least I knew who I was.

I have crossed over, and that childhood is as far away and strange as something that happened to someone else in a land beyond the sea. That boy is not me, though I am what he became.

I think it's because it's startling every time - every single time - that such beauty and such loss coincide in every life, in every soul, in every memory.

The things you lose do shape who you become. There's no getting around that. But the losses don't obliterate what came before.

The only way I could seem to cope with this overwhelming longing was by perseverating about what I could have changed.