Stacey D'Erasmo Quotes

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

That's history. I say history because it happened in the past.

Memory is a capricious and arbitrary creature. You never can tell what pebble she will pick up from the shore of life to keep among her treasures, or what inconspicuous flower of the field she will preserve as the symbol of "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." . . . And yet I do not doubt that the most Important things are always the best remembered.

One of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.

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

I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

Memory is a way of telling you what's important to you.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

I only see clearly what I remember.

Memory narrativises itself.

The past is where its supposed to be.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

History is the present day consideration of what went before.

History takes time... History makes memory.

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

We all want to explain ourselves. Nobody wants to be forgotten.

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