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Remembering Quotes

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Remembering Quotes

“Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles of wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and the big gear? It seems there's a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I'll never find them again - never.”

“So why bother investing in one’s memory in an age of externalized memories? The best answer I can give is the one I received unwittingly from EP, whose memory had been so completely lost that he could not place himself in time or space, or relative to other people. That is: How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memories. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character.”

“Is it odd to picnic at one's mother's grave? To sit up on the cliff and trickle pebbles over the ledge and listen to them bounce until they disappear? To eat an apple, to feel the sun, and to remember her, she who gave so much that it will never diminish? Is it odd to live with ehr in you, to continue to share your days and thoughts with the presence of her loving spirit?”

“Max. God, but she was stubborn. And tough. And closed in. Closed off. Except when she was holding Angel, or ruffling the Gasman’s hair, or pushing something closer to Iggy’s hand so he could find it easily without knowing anyone had helped him. Or when she was trying to untangle Nudge’s mane of hair. Or-sometimes-when she was looking at Fang. He shifted on the hard ground, a half-dozen flashes of memory cycling through his brain. Max looking at him and laughing. Max leaping off a cliff, snapping out her wings, flying off, so incredibly powerful and graceful that it took his breath away. Max punching someone’s lights out, her face like stone. Max kissing that weiner Sam on Anne’s front porch. Gritting his teeth, Fang rolled onto his side. Max kissing him on the beach, after Ari had kicked Fang’s butt. Just now, her mouth soft under his. He wished she were here, if not next to him, then somewhere in the cave, so he could hear her breathing. It was going to be hard to sleep without that tonight.”

“It was evenings like that when beneath dim light and relaxing in a sultry bath that she missed him the most. A flicker of candlelight, wind breathing snow against the window and the soothing scent of creme caramel – all were a comfort to her as she closed her eyes, summoned memories and many a tender thought. She didn't feel deserving of the devotion bestowed upon her, but she had finally learned to accept its wondrous gift, knowing that love was the source of existence and its only end.”

“No person is more ruthlessly cheated than someone strip-mined of his or her ability to recall the vibrancy of the past. After all, what would any person be if robbed of all sense of long-term memory? Without memories, all that any person would know about life is if he or she was hungry or thirsty, cold or hot. Without memories of the past and shredded of any illusion of a future there cannot be a frame for our existence. Without a sense of memory, we lack cognition of the very essence of our being. In absence of our memories, there can be no introspection, no ethical awareness, and no devotion, loyalty, or love.”

“And sometimes, if she was brave enough, she would turn to the memories of little James. Not the end, but the days before. When she would slide her pinky into his open palm and his tiny fingers would close tight around it. He would peer around the room with his brand-new eyes, and Helen thought that perhaps after the womb, this dark, tight space probably seemed about right. He was wonderfully oblivious to the danger they were in. She became his protector, and for those days, that was all she was. It changed everything. It changed her. And somehow, he in turn protected Helen. He was the sun that couldn’t reach them—he broke away the darkness. As she thought of him, of those red curls and blue eyes, Helen found herself feeling the warmth from him, even though he was gone.”

“I figured we really shouldn’t grieve for those who leave us for God. They’ve arrived at their destinations with lucky souls no longer burdened by our piddling human considerations. It may seem cruel when they die so young or so beautiful or so loved. Cry not for them, for the life not lived. Cry only for your own hurt in missing them. That’s the only true loss. And in those sad moments when you remember a touch, or catch them watching from the corner of your eye, understand they left you with a lesson. Everyone who touches your life teaches you something important you’re meant to learn. Somehow their visit here pushed your own soul along its path. Learning that lesson is the best way you can honor them.”

“Which is better? To have heard the sound of children’s laughter? To have listened to the song of birds at morning’s peak? To have beat your fingers in rhythm to the cities traffic? to have giggled at the whispers of your lover’s sweet… nothings? Or never hearing any of those things at all? Therefore never, forever craving those things that was? Which is better? Aw deaf man. Can you even hear me?”

“That’s the funny thing about stories — like all living things, they need to adapt and evolve in order to survive in their environment. Consider for a second that you can drop the same exact species into ten different ecosystems and within a few dozen generations, they could be hardly recognizable from their original form or to each other. The same is true for stories. They mutate to fit the cognitive conditions of each person’s specific mental habitat. That’s why a group of people can experience the same exact event, and within a decade or two, the story of that event can be wildly different as told by each person who experienced it.”

““Noah?” I gasped, trying to understand through the screams in my head. “I’ve got you. I swear to God, I’ve got you,” said Noah. “Stay with me, Echo.” I wanted to. I wanted to stay with him, but the shouting and screams and glass breaking in my mind grew louder. “Make it stop.” He tightened his grip on my arms. “Fight, Echo! You’ve got to f*cking fight. Come on, baby. You’re safe.””

“Then one morning she’d begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn’t remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she’d realized again what she’d learned at five when her mother left – that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting the small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she’d worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother’s voice, the color of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree’s heartwood.”

“Nostalgia is not indulgence. Nostalgia tells us we are in the presence of imminent revelation, about to break through the present structures held together by the way we have remembered: something we thought we understood but that we are now about to fully understand, something already lived but not fully lived, issuing not from our future but from something already experienced; something that was important, but something to which we did not grant importance enough, something now wanting to be lived again, at the depth to which it first invited us but which we originally refused. Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past, nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end.”

“And numerous indeed are the hearts to which Christmas brings a brief season of happiness and enjoyment. How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight; and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the religious belief of the most civilised nations, and the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blessed and happy! How many old recollections, and how many dormant sympathies, does Christmas time awaken! We write these words now, many miles distant from the spot at which, year after year, we met on that day, a merry and joyous circle. Many of the hearts that throbbed so gaily then, have ceased to beat; many of the looks that shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; the hands we grasped, have grown cold; the eyes we sought, have hid their lustre in the grave; and yet the old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday! Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home!”

“There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ's sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It's all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It's all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries.”

“One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be but only in harmless, perfunctory ways. Many of us will, if only as a kind of psychological self-defense. So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting. But so many will remember. We say that, sometimes, when it's our children killed: Remember. And it may seem now like it's someone else's children, but there's no such thing as someone else's children. The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one's opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one's own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.”

“The real reason the number of things that are shared via social media every single minute is so astronomical is because, whenever they each do, most users do not share or say something because they believe they have something worth remembering; they do mainly or only because they fear being forgotten.”

“It seems that the people who come into our lives and stay for the briefest amount of time have the greatest impact upon us. Time may change some things, but not all things. Each day brings me closer to him, and the age in which he passed from this world into the next, but I still fight the urge, on rare occasions, to pick up the phone and dial his number, which I still remember. It's decades later, but that last meal we shared, laughing and smiling at each other from across the table, lost in harmony, seems but yesterday. Then there was the last lingering look and the final wave goodbye.”