Toni Morrison Quotes

Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.

I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?

I think everyone must have a first memory of some house, some room, a vivid picture that will remain deep down in one forever.

We persist and linger longer than we think, leaving traces of ourselves wherever we go. If you take that away, then we all simply vanish.

Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

A lot of things you see as a child remain with you... you spend a lot of your life trying to recapture the experience.

Memory is more indelible than ink.

The fragments for the past, for me, are not without life.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

I'm surprised by how much I remember [on childhood on film]. I think it's just because I had these interesting moments. Of course, you never know when they're interesting moments, but there was a lot of stuff that I remember and have attached significance to later. I remember enough. I remember highlights.

Those who live in memories are never really dead." The House At Riverton

The entire world is a collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.

To forget someone means to think of him.

The life doesn't simply get erased. It gets imprinted and remembered.

I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.

I think "waste of your brain" is something that my mother would say to me occasionally - I think it's usually when I'm telling her something like that I can remember every outfit I've ever worn.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

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.

Places remember events.

The trace I leave to me means at once my death, to come or already come, and the hope that it will survive me. It is not an ambition of immortality; it is fundamental. I leave here a bit of paper, I leave, I die; it is impossible to exit this structure; it is the unchanging form of my life. Every time I let something go, I live my death in writing.

The past is always with us, for nothing that once was time can ever depart.

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.