Alice McDermott Quotes

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.

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

Only our memories allow that some people ever existed. That they mattered, or mattered too much.

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

We exist as long as somebody remembers us.

If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.

I wanted desperately to go on living in someone's memory. If we are not remembered, we are more than dead, for it is as if we had never lived

My wife says that my tombstone will read, 'Here lies Mr.C, who used to be Mr.B.' So I think that's probably what I'll be remembered for.

What does legacy mean? I never think or go there.

It's hard to say what I want my legacy to be when I'm long gone.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

My biggest fear in life is to be forgotten.

Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory.

All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.

We just want to be remembered before something is set in stone.

We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.

Everybody wants to be remembered for the best of who they are.

I want to be remembered.

I think it's crucial that we remember the lives of people, not their deaths. Our deaths are not our lives.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.

We burn the evil men do with their mortal remains. We treasure the memory of the good they do, and distance magnifies it.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

What we leave behind in this life is the memory of who we were and what we did. An imprint, no more.

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness. Not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are responsible for what we do with those memories