Quotes About Remembrance

For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

Joe the storyteller was remembered at the Swan for a long, long time. And though eventually there came a day when the man himself was forgotten, his stories lived on.

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist.

Seventeen years being neither a very short nor a very long time, Phillip was remembered and misremembered in equal measure.

He was the first of my ghosts.

but death so rapidly undoes a person, and the detail of her face was hard to recall in any ordinary way.

In reference to four of the most notorious death camps, Snyder notes, "The 1.6 million or so Jews killed at Treblinka, Chelmni, Belzec and Sobibor were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide." At Auschwitz, the Nazis used Zyklon B hydrogen cyanide gas to kill an additional one million Jews.

As long as I live I shall remember that silent minute.

your father and I were in the trenches together, in the Great War. That was a war all right. Oh I know there have been other wars since, better-publicized ones, more expensive ones perhaps, but our war is the one I'll always remember. Our war is the one that means war to me.

We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.

One day, of course, no one will remember what I remember.

If you aren't telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.

The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock.

Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event-everything I did for the rest of my life-would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

In New York, everything reminded me of my mother—every taxi, every street corner, every cloud that passed over the sun—but out in this hot mineral emptiness, it was as if she had never existed; I could not even imagine her spirit looking down on me. All trace of her seemed burned away in the thin desert air.

Every new event - everything I did for the rest of my life - would only separate us more and more: days she was n longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone.

Because I love Henry. Henry's dead. I can't help it. I still love him.

But for all foreseeable time to come- for as long as history was written, until the icecaps melted and the streets of Amsterdam were awash with water- the painting would be remembered and mourned. Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof of the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead:their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished at light at the heart of the world.

we spent a sad afternoon burying her in the back garden of Francis's house, where one of Francis's aunts had an elaborate cat cemetery, complete with headstones

Twelve years ago, in vision or reality, I certainly saw you. I could not forget your face. It has remained before my eyes ever since.

But, I suspect, in all lives there are certain emotional scenes, those in which our passions have been most wildly and terribly roused, that are of all others the most vaguely and dimly remembered.