Quotes about Memory

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.

No child, not even the most ordinary, forgets or forgives a single one of the commands inflicted on it.

I don't want my past to become anyone else's future.

But because of his telling, many who did not believe have come to believe, and some who did not care have come to care. He tells the story, out of infinite pain, partly to honor the dead, but also to warn the living - to warn the living that it could happen again and that it must never happen again. Better than one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.

Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to life as long as God himself

The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria...

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

There are so many who know more than I do, who understand the world better than I do. I would be truly learned, a great scholar, if only I could retain everything I've learned from those I have known. But then would I still be me? And isn't all that only words? Words grow old, too; they change their meaning and their usage. They get sick just as we do; they die of their wounds and then they are relegated to the dust of dictionaries. And where am I in all this?

Even if I wrote on nothing else, it would never be enough, even if all the survivors did nothing but write about their experiences, it would still not be enough. *Response when asked how much longer is he going to write about the Holocaust.

I didn't know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever.