Quotes About Remembrance

We lose track of everything, and of everyone, even ourselves. The facts of my father's life are less known to me than those of the life of Hadrian. My own existence, if I had to write of it, would be reconstructed by me from externals, laboriously, as if it were the life of someone else: I should have to turn to letters, and to the recollections of others, in order to clarify such uncertain memories. What is ever left but crumbled walls, or masses of shade?

La mémoire de la plupart des hommes est un cimetière abandonné, où gisent sans honneurs des morts qu'ils ont cessé de chérir. Toute douleur prolongée insulte à leur oubli.

Sometimes, after long intervals, I have thought to feel the slight stir of an approach, a touch as light as the contact of eyelashes and warm as the hollow of a hand. And the shade of Patroclus appears at Achilles' side..

La mémoire des hommes est un cimetière abandonné, où gisent sans honneurs des morts qu'ils ont cessé de chérir.

De herinnering van de meeste mensen is een verlaten kerkhof, waar de doden die ze hebben opgehouden lief te hebben eerloos terneerliggen. Elk langdurig verdriet is een aanklacht tegen hun vergetelheid.

Whole chapters of contemporary history are disappearing into the ether as e-mails get trashed and webpages are taken down and people die without sharing their passwords.

from HOUSEKEEPING, by Marilynne Robinson: There is remembrance, and communion, altogether human and unhallowed. For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings. Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number and all the same.

It seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost.

L'Occident a vendu des armes aux deux camps et nous, nous avons été assez bêtes pour rentrer dans ce jeu cynique...huit ans de guerre pour rien! Alors maintenant l'état donne des noms de martyrs aux rues pour flatter les familles des victimes. Ills trouvent peut-être ainsi un sens à toute cette absurdité.

?nsanlar affetmeyi bilmeli ama asla unutmamal?d?r.

Hue had become a city of the dead.

When he got back to Phu Bai, one of the walking wounded, he was ordered to look through nearly a hundred body bags and identify those he recognized. It took him two days to complete the job, unzipping the bags and looking at the pale, lifeless faces.

What would your mother think about that?" which is stupid because Mother is dead and you can't say anything to people who are dead and dead people can't think.

And Peter Lake knew that these things were nothing in themselves but the means by which to remember those he had loved, and to remind him that the power of the love he had known was repeated a million times a million times over, from one soul to another--all worthy, all holy, none ever lost. He glided through the illusions that flashed bravely on the smoke, and he was touched very deeply by the will of things to live in the light.

Remember, what we are trying to do in this life is to shatter time and bring back the dead. Rise, Virginia. Rise and see the whole world." Virginia

Memories are not images of loved ones returning to us. They are the spirits of loved ones visiting us.

Sauver quelque chose du temps où l'on ne sera plus jamais.

They are all dead now.

Cicerón tachó a la ingratitud de olvido.

I could not help mentioning this picture that had once meant so much to me; and to name the dead is always a kind of tribute to them: one I felt Mr. Deacon deserved.

There are things that will not have themselves buried and put out of sight, as though they had never been.

The smell of roasted flesh permeated the air for hours afterwards with the stench of oily-black smoke from the blazing vehicles . Gräbner's body was never identified among all the other carbonized corpses.

A Dutchman stepped out of his house and asked two British Soldiers if they would like a cup of tea. A little further back along the route they had come, the bodies of British paratroopers lay 'everywhere, many of them behind trees or poles', Albert Horstman of the Arnhem underground recorded. He then saw 'a man about middle-aged, who wore a hat. This man went to every dead soldier, lifted his hat and stood in silence for a few seconds.

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.