Wendell Berry Quotes

Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On

memory is the only way home.

Petals floating by, Drift through my woman's hand, As she remembers me.

Friends depart, and memory takes them To her caverns, pure and deep.

Few have wished for memory so much as they have longed for forgetfulness.

Every day I'll wear your memory like a favorite shirt upon my back

History could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one's eyelids.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

Oak, granite, Lilies by the road, Remember me? I remember you. Clouds brushing Clover hills, Remember me? Sister, child, Grown tall, Remember me? I remember you.

Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.

Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.

Remembrance of things past.

Back on its golden hinges The gate of Memory swings, And my heart goes into the garden And walks with the olden things.

The past is the sepulchre of our dead emotions.

I end not far from my going forth By picking the faded blue Of the last remaining aster flower To carry again to you.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

But where are the snows of yester year?

I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.

Let us say in the pocket of one of my old coats I find a movie ticket from many years ago. Once I see the ticket, not only do I remember that I saw this movie, but also scenes from this movie, which I think I have entirely forgotten, come back to me. Objects have this power, and I like it.

When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.