Quotes about memory

That's the funny thing about old hurts- they just wait for new heartache to come along and then show up, just as sharp and horrible as the first day you woke up with the world changed all around you.

If we are to heed the past to prepare for the future, we should listen to these voices of a generation that speaks to us of duty and honor, sacrifice and accomplishment. I hope more of their stories will be preserved and cherished as reminders of all that we owe them and all that we can learn from them.

It takes enormous trust and courage to allow yourself to remember.

Those frozen December days, the last days of 2002, come back to me years later slightly blurred, shining through the mist, as though preserved in my memory right from the start with a slightly unreal distortion. Or perhaps it's that over time they have lost some of their sharpness and acquired a dreamy afterglow. 14

...my gaze meets the laptop screen and the words I poured out all afternoon. It began yesterday without any particular intent, just a quick reply to my sister. But today when I went back, the email suddenly took on a different form, more feverish, more poetic. I was seized by a storytelling binge, a lucid, cutting clarity, and from page to page the words joined together and frothed and flowed. And it is then that I realize I am not writing to Iris anymore. That the recipient is in fact myself, an as-of-yet unknown self, a me who has long ago gone back to Israel and is living my tomorrow-life in Tel Aviv, a distant me who will one day open up this file and read the words, and perhaps with hindsight have a better understanding of what is occurring inside me now, what I am going through in these mad and beautiful days. She will remember us as we once were, in New York, in Hilmi's Brooklyn studio. She will read the lines and remember how I sat here once on this couch, in December of 2002, like the bird perched on the windowsill all afternoon, and watched myself loving him while I wrote these words. (chapter 14)

She remembered Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions once saying that no story was worth telling if no one could remember the lesson in it. These were stories that have made no difference to anyone. Old Aunty was fading away forever. But... even true stories have to be invented sometimes to be remembered. Ah! The truth was always forgotten. (p210)

In the 1960s, my grandmother Elisabeth, so assiduous in her letter-writing, such an advocate for the letter (‘write again, write more fully’), burnt the hundreds of letters and notes she had received from her poetic grandmother Evelina.

Not ‘Who would be interested?’ But ‘Don’t come near this. This is private.’…

There is something about that burning of all those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiralling in ash up into the air of Tunbridge Wells? Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. Losing things can sometimes gain you a space in which to live….

The problem is that I am in the wrong century to burn things. I am the wrong generation to let it go. I think of a library carefully sorted into boxes. I think of all those careful burnings by others, the systematic erasing of stories, the separations between people and their possessions, and then of people from their families and families from their neighbourhoods. And then from their country.

There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost.

"Quiet is easy to achieve," Dick repeatedly said, "but true peace must come from within." That was where the farm came in, a quiet piece of Pennsylvania where he could forget about the war. Without that refuge, Dick's thoughts always returned to the war, those horrendous battles, those fallen comrades, those lucky ones who suffered the million-dollar wound and returned to the States while the survivors went on.

He approached the subject of what he referred to as "flashes from the past" only after we had known each other for five years. He turned to me once, changing the subject that we had been discussing, and said, "Don't you think it's strange that fifty-eight years after the war, I can't get these images out of my mind?"

"Not at all, Dick. Every soldier bears the emotional scars of combat long after the war ends. War is only attractive to those who know nothing about it. I remember how one of the war's correspondents, I think it was Ernie Pyle, but I'm not sure, said at war's end, 'All we can do is fumble and try once more- try out of the memory of our anguish- and be as tolerant we can.'"

All things are known, but most things are forgotten. It takes a special magic to remember them.

People often forget that they too are subject to the whims of the sea, that their flesh and bone can be pulled down and swallowed up just like anything else. But the sea remembers. It remembers everything, from the smallest broken shell to the largest sunken ship.

Our people were canoe people. Until they made us walk. Until our lakeshore lodges were signed away for shanties and dust. Our people were a circle, until we were dispersed. Our people shared a language with which to thank the day, until they made us forget. But we didn’t forget. Not quite.