remembering loved ones Quotes

“Every pound of granite, every begonia blossom, Charlie thought, was proof of the enduring human need to be remembered.”

“It was, I remembered thinking, the most difficult walk anyone had to make. In every way, a walk to remember.”

“My momma and poppa appeared from the shadows. They flew to me and wrapped their arms around me and cooled my face with their ghost tears.”

“Papa’s life ended at Manzanar . . . Until this trip I had not been able to admit that my own life really began there.”

“People are realizing and shouting and marching and demanding. They’re not forgetting. I think that’s the most important part.”

“Each time, Salva would think of his family and his village, and he was somehow able to keep his wounded feet moving forward, one painful step at a time.”

“Salva stood still inside the terminal doors for a few moments. Leaving the airport felt like leaving his old life forever-Sudan, his village, his family.”

“I don’t need to worry that Finch and I never filmed our wanderings. It’s okay that we didn’t collect souvenirs or that we never had time to pull it all together in a way that made sense to anyone else but us. The thing I realize is that it’s not what you take, but it’s what you leave.”

“Maybe, if I wear the glasses long enough, I can be like her. I can see what she saw. I can be both of us at once so no one will have to miss her, most of all me.”

“Suddenly I’m having one of those moments that you have after losing someone - when you feel as if you’ve been kicked in the stomach and all your breath is gone, and you might never get it back. I want to sit down in the dirty, littered ground right now and cry until I can’t cry anymore.”

“Being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.”

“At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man.”

“ ‘We all have stories, just as you do. Ways in which he touched us, helped us, gave us money, sold it to us wholesale. Lots of stories, big and small. They all add up. Over a lifetime it all adds up. That’s why we’re here, William. We’re a a part of him, who he is, just as he is a part of us. You still don’t understand, do you?’ I didn’t. But as I stared at the man and he stared back at me, in my father’s dream I remembered where we’d met before. ‘And what did my father do for you?’ I asked him, and the old man smiled. ‘He made me laugh,’ he said.”

“Every new event - everything I did for the rest of my life - would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.”

“First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.”

“In the lobby, the people gathered at the bar clinked their glasses together. ‘To Arthur,’ they said. They drank for a few more minutes and then went their separate ways in the storm. Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.”

“There’s no good way to lose a loved one—just, in the words of one twenty-six-year-old woman, ‘different kinds of hell.’ ”

“My mom was still my mom, even if she only lived in books and door locks and the smell of fried tomatoes and old paper. She lived.”

“The town looked lonely, and it made me sad. Somehow the magic was gone, without her.”

“Know someone as much as you can. Hold onto the moments that define them. Then when their body leaves, they won’t.”

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.”

“I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently.”

“No matter how much time passes, those we have loved never slip away from us entirely.”

“As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on—in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.”

“Losing Moms did break my heart, creating a void in the world where once her smile had been--the sight of which I will miss until the day I die. There was so much more to come that I still wanted to share with her, to make her happy.”

“It is a brutal arithmetic. But I - I am alive. You are alive. As long as we breathe, we can see and hear. As long as we remember, all those gone before are alive inside us.”

“I looked at the long dirt road that crawled across the plains, remembering the morning that Mama had died, cruel and sunny. They had come for her in a wagon and taken her away to be buried. And then the cousins and aunts and uncles had come and tried to fill up the house. But they couldn’t.”