Abraham Polonsky Quotes

We celebrate the past to awaken the future.

Our past is who we are, and death is one of our experiences. I lost my husband a long time ago, but it's always yesterday.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

History takes time... History makes memory.

The past is more than a memory.

History is the memory of time, the life of the dead and the happiness of the living.

Is that a birthday? 'tis, alas! too clear; 'Tis but the funeral of the former year.

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

I'll never forget the first time I saw someone who had died. It was my grandfather. And I knelt next to his coffin. And all I could do was eye level was look at his hands. They were enormous hands. And all I could think was, 'Those hands dug freedom for me.'

Age makes all things greater after their death; a name comes to the tongue easier from the grave.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

It's very inconvenient because every time I finish, let's say, a chapter of a book, I think I'm going to ring Richard and then realize: Oh, Christ, I've buried him. I buried him last year.

We, who are the living, possess the past. Tomorrow is for our martyrs.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

Let us drink together, fellows, as we did in days of yore. And still enjoy the golden hours that Fortune has in store; The absent friends remembered be, in all that’s sung or said, And Love immortal consecrate the memory of the dead.

The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory.

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

How do you commemorate a year? A paper anniversary, but we are the words written down, not the paper.

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.

We hold reunions, not for the dead, for there is nothing in all the earth that you and I can do for the dead. They are past our help and past our praise. We can add to them no glory, we can give to them no immortality. They do not need us, but forever and forever more we need them.

The past is the sepulchre of our dead emotions.

Do you recall Fred Merriville?” She stared at him. “Fred Merriville? Pray, what has he to say to anything?” “The poor fellow has nothing to say: he’s dead, alas!