W. Eugene Smith Quotes

When I tell my colleagues that I remember 1969, 1974 and 1987, their eyes glaze over, but I'm afraid I do remember them, and I therefore err on the side of caution.

I became a photographer in order to be a war photographer, and a photographer involved in what I thought were critical social issues. From the very beginning this was my goal.

What I find compelling is the moment in which people realize, with suffering and pain, that in the past there was a time when they were happy, because back then the present and the future coincided - they were one and the same thing.

It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.

Forgive but never forget

Imagine there wasn't photography. Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? It links us all. It keeps us all together; it's what our history is.

Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us.

Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to life as long as God himself

A tale begun in other days, When summer suns were glowing - A simple chime, that served to time The rhythm of your rowing - Whose echoes live in memory yet, Though envious years would say 'forget.

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

Night is the time to weep,To wet with unseen tearsThose graves of memory where sleepThe joys of other years.

She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again. Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, her new eyes might make everything seem different from the way she saw it now. The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.

I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.

Since I met him ten years ago there hasn't been a day that I didn't think of George Burns. And I didn't think of him again today.

There was a brief silence in which the distant echo of Hagrid smashing down a wooden front door seemed to reverberate through the intervening years.

One has the impression that something is stirring inside [photographs] - it is as if one can hear little cries of despair, gémissements de désespoir... as if the photographs themselves had a memory and were remembering us and how we, the surviving, and those who preceded us, once were.

Five years have come, and five years have gone, and still we stand together as one. We come back to this place to remember the heartbreaking anniversary - and each person who died here - those known and unknown to us, whose absence is always with us.

Paintings are memories. Memories of the painter who painted them. Memories that can be shared as well. Paintings are things to remember things by.

Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it.

I did some research on this a couple years ago," Augustus continued. "I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?" "And are there?" "Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about

The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we're gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure.

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

If death is truly a curse,' Spock said, as soberly as some power pronouncing a hundred years of sleep, but with a glint of private, serene humor in his eyes. 'There is little logic in condemning something one has not experienced...or does not remember experiencing.

But you were something more than young and sweet And fair, - and the long year remembers you.

The sands of time cannot be stopped. Years pass whether we will them or not... but we can remember. What has been lost may yet live in memories.