Quotes About Memory

A country losing touch with its own history is like an old man losing his glasses, a distressing sight, at once vulnerable, unsure, and easily disoriented.

I can with truth assure you, I heard Bulletts whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.

Nostalgia is a seductive liar.

Author complains about "the further submergence of irrecoverable history into a perpetually churned present.

Romance like a ghost escapes touching it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.

L'honneur d'un peuple appartient aux morts et les vivants n'en ont que l'usufruit

Do not trust your memory it is a net full of holes the most beautiful prizes slip through it.

We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.

To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.

Il y a donc des amours pareils à ces fruits de la Mer Morte qui ne vous laissent à la bouche qu'un goût de cendre impérissable.

For twenty years I strove to free myself from what I retained of my education; I indulged my curiosity by reading books less to learn than to efface from my memory the ideas that had been thrust upon it.

my memory is reasonably good—unlike yours, dear sir!" "Mine is erratic," he said imperturbably. "I remember only what interests me.

In the end, writing arises when man realizes that memory is not enough.

There is no time machine except the human being.

We are constantly producing the past. We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past. Even death doesn't put a stop to this. A person might be gone, but his past remains.

Forgetting takes a lot of work. You have to constantly remember that you are supposed to forget something. Surely, that's how every ideology functions.

You can't make a museum to preserve something that has never left.

He has no friends, no living relatives. No one to call. If we are not in someone else's memory, do we even exist at all?

The past grows like a weed.

The past settles into afternoons, that's where time visibly slows down, it dozes off in the corners, blinking like a cat looking through thin blinds. It's always afternoon when you remember something, at least that's how it is for me. Everything is in the light.

Now the last person who remembered me as a child is gone, I told myself. And only then did I burst into sobs, like a child.

Uvijek je popodne kada se ne?ega sjetimo, ili je barem kod mene tako. Sve je svjetlost. Znam s fotografija da je popodnevna svjetlost najprikladnija za ekspoziciju. Popodnevna je stara svjetlost, umorna i spora. Pravi život svijeta i ?ovjeka može se opisati kroz nekoliko popodneva koja su poslijepodneva svijeta.

Sometimes we don't stop to think how some historical event only appears to be more distant than it actually is. When I was born, the Second World War was a mere twenty-three years in the past, but it has always seemed like a completely different epoch to me.

If someone asks me what I did last year, I can safely answer that I smoked.