Quotes about Memory

Even old, your husband is the young man you remember now. Even dead, he is the man you remember, not as he was but as he is, alive still in your love. Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life.

New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure. "What can't be helped must be endured," Mat Feltner said. And he was a man who knew.

Mr. Feltner—who would not be "Mat" to me for a long time—turned to me and stuck out his hand. "Mr. Crow, I'm Mat Feltner. I'm glad to know you. I knew your mother's people. I remember the Daggets very well." There was nothing glancing or sidling about the way he looked at you. He looked right through your eyes, right into you, as a man looks at you who is willing for you to look right into him.

He didn't know, as we grownups knew, what the war meant and might mean. He had only understood that what we were that day was lovely and could not last.

Now, surely, I am getting old, for my memory of myself as a young man seems now to be complete, as a story told. The young man leaps, and lands on an old man's legs.

I never shed a tear that day, but all day long I saw Margaret as her father and her grandfather saw her. I loved her that day with my love but also with theirs.

Mat felt the change upon himself. Now he was the oldest, and the longest memory was his. Now between him and the grave stood no other man. From here on he would find the way for himself.

My mother is a fish.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

Memory believes before knowing remembers.

I give it (grandfather's watch) to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.

Caddy olÃ