Quotes about memory

Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through, is now like something from the distant past. We're so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like ancient stars that have burned out, are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. New styles, new information, new technology, new terminology ... But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone. And for me, what happened in the woods that day is one of these.

I hate funerals, think they’re pompous and silly and disgusting. I hate the thought of having one myself even though I won’t know about it while it’s happening. Since I’m a public figure I suppose there’ll have to be one, but I don’t want the only person I really love there sharing in it. If I die, I don’t want you to see me dead, even the outside of a coffin. I want your last memory of me to be as I am now, alive. I don’t want you even to think about a funeral or send flowers. Will you promise me those things, Max?

“Yes, if you’ll quit talking about them.”

There are no ghosts, my love. Death is final. The soul is that ineffable combination of memory and personality which we carry through life...when life departs, the soul also dies. Except for what we leave in the memory of those who loved us.

Memory is so subjective. We all remember in a visceral, emotional way, and so even if we agree on the facts—what was said, what happened where and when—what we take away and store from a moment, what we feel about it, can vary radically.

There is no way to get your health back. You live on memories of what was and fantasies about what might have been. Both can be deadly to the man who loses sight of the demarcation between them and reality.

Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts – in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been.

I ask my kids every semester when I teach ethics. I finish the semester by asking them to spend five minutes writing their obituary. They hate it. They think it is corny, and it might be a little corny. And then I ask them if they will volunteer to read some of them, and when they do, it always becomes clear people want to be remembered for the kindnesses they showed other people. And what I point out to them- what I try to point out- is that it is not how big your bank account balance is. Nobody ever puts that in their draft obituary, or that they billed the most hours, or that they won the most cases. It is how you treated other people along the way that matters. And for me, it is the words I read yesterday from Increase Sumner's tombstone [see page 321]. And that means as a person I would like to be remembered as a good dad, a good husband, kind and mild in private life, dignified and firm in public life. I have no illusions that I will be remembered for very long. If Byron White is nearly forgotten, as he is now and said he would be, I have no illusions that I will last five minutes. That is as it should be.

Amnesia was the price of immortality.

When power is gone the memory of power lingers.

Nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.

I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to. (p234)

'If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.' (p165)