Quotes about Memory

Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage.

Over the last fifteen months we've traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been to fifty-seven states. I think, one left to go.

Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead and buried - it is not even past.

I lost a child, she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

The first to fall in any war are forgotten.

You can fool history sometimes, but you can't fool the memory of your intimates.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative truth but not its twin.

The first to fall in any war are forgotten. No love gets lost over one person's reckless mistake. Only after it's a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag and call the mistake by a different name, because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something. It needs its own brand, some point to all the sacrifice. Mom was the unknown soldier.

Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

I can change. I can live out of my imagination instead of my memory.

If you love the truth, you can remember it.

Apart from the before, the now has little meaning. The now is only a thin slice of who I am; isolated from the rich deposits of before, it cannot be understood.