Quotes About Memory

Selective memory is the handmaiden of fashion.

These ruins are to the future what the past is to us

Memory a wind passing through the blood trees within us

The tanks dug ladders in the earth no one was able to climb In every war someone puts a cigarette in the corpse's mouth And the corpse The corpse is never mentioned In the hours before his empty body was found It was this, this life that he longed for, this that he wrote of desiring, Yet this life leaves out everything for which he lived

After beating Lorca with their rifle butts and calling him a faggot, they filled him with bullets. The grave, sought by many, has never been found.

She began reciting something that sounded almost like litany: Aguilares, Padre Grande, Padre Navarro, aquí en San Salvador y en Aguilares y campesinos, "hundreds, three hundreds, all dead, even niños dead.

Carolyn Forché

The deliberate effort of memory for small detail is a social grace that will take a person far.

What one remembers is, I think, a clue to what one wants to be.

Miss Edith Clay brightened the room with her presence. Just from walking through the door, she'd made the room a happier place. This was true despite his having spent the last several months assuring himself his recollection of her had to be incorrect. His recollection was not incorrect. It was appallingly accurate.

The one thing I do remember is that as I retraced my steps through all the familiar streets of my life, Inow felt completely lost.

Imagine if our lives were treated as carefully as the rest of history. Imagine if we were documented as conscientiously, preserved as gently. Each birth at least as important as a naval victory. Each death a national tragedy. There are plenty of ways to remember someone: a park bench, a colossus, an epic poem. Your only job is creating a life that contains a story worth telling.

I remember my wife in white.' It just made people weep to hear it...Everybody just thought it was the saddest sentence that was ever written. And it didn't matter if I never wrote another word. This one sentence had put an end to the need for any future sentences. I had said it all.

It's a never ending dream for everyone it seems, to find again what was once precious and has been lost.

I'm here!" I said..."I'm read to go home!" As if they couldn't see me. As if I couldn't remember what it had been like, fluttering next to someone's ear and whispering into it. How the whole earth was like a musical instrument that we could play effortlessly. ...I could not fly. My sister was not there. My heart was broken.

How horribly easy it is, he thinks now, breathing hard, watching the light retreat down the lane, to go from good to bad, from the dream to the memory, from what we want to all we've ever had.

And each time she did, he would cry the way he had cried at his wife's funeral, understanding at last that grief is not accountable, that it lives wherever it chooses, and that the worst thing is this: after the first time, one always has the memory of it.

The hairstyle that was chosen would impact how everyone—every filmgoing human—would envision me for the rest of my life. (And probably even beyond—it's hard to imagine any TV obituary not using a photo of that cute little round-faced girl with goofy buns on either side of her inexperienced head.)

You love them until they can't feel loved anymore, then you keep on loving them as if they were still there—as if there's been a reprieve at the last moment and fate has reversed itself. It

There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind. —Hannah Senesh, poet, playwright, and paratrooper (1921–1944)

You pounce on everything you said with a pair of tweezers and pluck it about until you can't remember exactly what it is you said, what context it was in, if you even said it, and if anyone heard you at all.

If anyone reads this when I have passed to the big bad beyond I shall be posthumorously embarrassed. I shall spend my entire afterlife blushing. I'm

I can't remember events from yesterday, or earlier tonight when I put my credit cards away for safekeeping. Now for the life of me I don't know precisely what safekeeping is.

What you'll have of me after I journey to that great Death Star in the sky is an extremely accomplished daughter, a few books, and a picture of a stern-looking girl wearing some kind of metal bikini lounging on a giant drooling squid, behind a newscaster informing you of the passing of Princess Leia after a long battle with her head.