remembering the past Quotes

“Christmas at home had meant eating Momma’s bread pudding with maple syrup and nutmeg, and reading the Gospel of Matthew out loud whilst Ruth played in Momma’s lap. I was miles away from celebrating like that.”

“My belly ached again, as if I were still at sea and the waves were throwing me off balance.”

“Perhaps our brightest hope for the future lies in the lessons of the past. The people who have come to this country have made America, in the words of one perceptive writer, ‘a heterogeneous race but a homogeneous nation.’ ”

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

“My remembery called up the feel of being locked in the stocks, of my face being burnt, of him watching me from across the courtyard; him watching out for me. ‘Twas Curzon who made sure I survived. ‘Twas he who had been my steadfast friend since the day they brought me here.”

“Everything is gorgeous once it’s gone. ”

“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.”

“And with each sip, he remembered his family passing the bottles from hand to hand, laughing at the tickly bubbles, sharing and laughing together.”

In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets.

“Gran always likes the full moon to shine on this side of the house. She says it’s restful, and it reminds her of when she was a girl . . . And it means you don’t trip on the stairs.”

“I wanted to tell them, that I knew, that I remembered, and that I could not forget.′

“I cannot bear the weight of my past. Yet I cannot throw away the key to your cupboard.”

“You have to let go... you have to put it behind you...just get on with your life.”

“And in the fireplace itself, in a black pan set on a high wire rack, peanuts roasted over the hickory fire as the waning light of day swiftly deepened into a fine velvet night speckled with white forerunners of a coming snow, and the warm sound of husky voices and rising laughter mingled in tales of sorrow and happiness and days past but not forgotten.”

“There were no troublesome memories in his childish sleep; no token came to him of his brave days at college, of the glittering years when he flustered the hearts of many girls. There were only the white, safe walls of his crib and Nana and a man who came to see him sometimes, and a great big orange ball that Nana pointed at just before his twilight bed hour and called “sun.” When the sun went his eyes were sleepy – there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt him.”

“We have to remember everything. If we don’t, by the time we grow up it’ll be gone forever.”

“Remember this also: it’s always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.”

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

“I pause to look up at this massive school—two blocks square and seven stories high, a place that was meant to nourish us and prepare us for adulthood. But because we dared to challenge the Southern tradition of segregation, this school became, instead, a furnace that consumed our youth and forged us into reluctant warriors.”

“There have been times over the years when I’ve tried to leave Hailsham behind, when I’ve told myself I shouldn’t look back so much. But then there came a point when I just stopped resisting.”

“A return to the past, however impossible, was the yearning of many artists and intellectuals.”

“Or maybe I’m remembering it wrong.”

“Both men, once as close as men of that sort could be, stare at each other. One of them a man who refuses to forget the past, and one who can’t remember it at all.”

“Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before.”

“There was a clock, high up in the sun, and I thought about how, when you dont want to do a thing, your body will try to trick you into doing it, sort of unawares.”

“You know what I hate most of all, Will? Not being able to run anymore, like you.”

“The only one who had not lost for a single minute the awareness that [Rebeca] was alive and rotting in her wormhole was the implacable and aging Amaranta. […]Always, at every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought about Rebeca because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.”

“His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before.”

“Oh, if I had only known that day so long ago when I stood outside the parsonage in the cold, aching to belong to that circle of girls who did not want me.[…] I close my eyes and tremble with the memory. Wishing I could bring it back. Wishing. For I remember just how it was, and where I was standing and what I was feeling in that moment it was given to me to decide what to do.”

“The most embarrassing, awkward moments of your life are only remembered by you and no one else”

“If I turned right here I’d go up past my gallery—what was my gallery, now a vacant shop window—but I don’t want to, because that still hurts a little.”

“I close my eyes and let the darkness grow and spread until it morphs from a feeling of sadness into something worse: a memory, a flashback.”

“I can’t risk looking backwards, it’s always a bad idea.”

“I will never forget Jason. He was a good soldier. He honored me. But the war goes on.”

“The Middle Ages hangs over history’s belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.”

“Something like that happened to me, you know. I ... I’m not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another ... If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!”

“Well, I remember you describing the white face and the green hair to me when I was a kid. Scared the hell out of me. I thought you’d be interested... Yeah, well I had some interesting nightmares.”

“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.”

“Hannah nodded and took her aunt’s fingers from her lips. She said, in a voice much louder than she had intended, so loud that the entire table hushed at its sound, ‘I remember. Oh, I remember.‘”

“Live,” he whispered. “For my Chaya. For all our Chayas. Live. And remember.”

“But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself.”