Richard von Weizsaecker Quotes

We all look for lost time.

Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you planned: Only remember me; you understand It will be late to counsel then or pray. Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterward remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.

Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory.

I'm trying to make sense of lot of things with 'Tyrannosaur.' I'm trying to make sense of people who've left now. They're not here, they can't answer for themselves any more, they're gone. And I'm trying to make peace with those ghosts.

Can you really forgive if you can't forget?

Perhaps it's more merciful to forget the dead instead of remembering them.

The bottom line is I'm writing to save the dead. I'm writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

Grief and memory go together. After someone dies, that's what you're left with. And the memories are so slippery yet so rich.

An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.

I write - so it would seem - to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.

I only felt a cold wind blow while I tried to hang on to the past.

What's gone will never come back, but it exists when you think of it.

The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts.

To forget someone means to think of him.

How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.

I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.

When you put so much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.

I know that when I am dying, looking back, it will be women that I regret having argued with, women I sought to impress, to understand, was tortured by. Women I wish to see again, to see them smile and laugh and say, It was all as it should have been.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

His entired life bundled into wenty refuse sacks. His and her memories bundle away in Holly's mind. Each item unearthed dust, tears, laughter and memories. She bagged the items, cleared the dust, wiped her eyes and filed away the memories.

The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory - there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.

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.