2,914 Quotes About Memory

If this were a domestic tragedy, and it might well be, this would be your fatal flaw--your memory, vessel of your feelings.

Pulling down statues of rock from their high placeswe must level the expectationupon which they standwaiting for usto fulfill their imagewaitingfor our feet to replace them.Unless we refuse to sleepeven one night in houses of marblethe sight of our children's false pleasurewill undo usfor our children have grownin the shadow of what wasthe shape of marblebetween their eyes and the sunbut we do not wish to standlike great marble statuesbetween our children's eyesand their sun.

...wars are orgies of forgetfulness. The twentieth century has archived vast catacombs, tunnels of information in which researchers get lost and in the end abandon their research, catacombs that ever fewer people enter. Stored away---forgotten. The twentieth century, a century of great tidying that ends in cleansing; the twentieth century, a century of cleansing, a century of erasure. Language perhaps remains, but it too is crumbling.

In Jamaica, we live largely in the present, forgetting our history and our heroes. We think we can escape history. But our history haunts us, casts a shadow over the present, and daily reminds us to stop and take stock of it.

Memory is a dangerous function. It retrospectively gives meaning to that which did not have any. It retrospectively cancels out the internal illusoriness of events, which was their originality. But if events retained their original, enigmatic form, their ambiguous, terrifying form, there would doubtless no longer be any history.

El presente está solo. La memoriaErige el tiempo. Sucesión y engañoEs la rutina del reloj. El añoNo es menos vano que la vana historia.(The present is singular. It is memorythat sets up time. Both succession and errorcome with the routine of the clock. A yearis no less vanity than is history.)

I realized that these memories are central, they were the very reason for the book plundering. Robbing people of words and narrative is a way of imprisoning them.

But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty . . . And if we're talking about strong feelings that will never come again, I suppose it's possible to be nostalgic about remembered pain as well as remembered pleasure. And that opens up the field, doesn't it?

At which point exactly does the past give way to the present, and does time ever intersect? Through years of occupations, this house on Rákóczi út was forced to give way to new inhabitants. Just by being here, standing here in from of this house, we are bringing them all back, through memory.