Adam Cohen Quotes

Let mourning stop when one's grief is fully expressed.

We all mourn in our own way. I mourn with a great steak.

Only poetry can address grief.

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

I could not remember my first kiss, but I could have told you Charlotte would be my last.

Scarcely two hundred years back can Fame recollect articulately at all; and there she but maunders and mumbles.

But the impressions which the morning makes vanish with its dews, and not even the most "persevering mortal" can preserve the memory of its freshness to midday.

If I ever tell the same story twice, just laugh and roll with it because, when you get older, you start doing that kind of stuff.

You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.

God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.

It's all very hazy to me now. I'm glad I made it through that stage. It got a little dicey. There were some drugs going on. I remember singing one song for about a day and a half.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.

A guy says, I'm so old that I forgot how old I am. An old woman says, I'll tell you how old you are. Take off your clothes and bend over. The man does this. The woman says, You're seventy four. The man says, How can you tell? The woman says, You told me yesterday.

Once you learn how to do something, you don't lose it. Unless you die.

Grief is a funny thing because you don't have to carry it with you for the rest of your life. After a bit you set it down by the roadside and walk on and leave it.

What did Mira show your attacker last week? he asked, desperate to turn the attention away from himself now. Yakut shrugged. Only he can know. The girl has no knowledge of what her eyes reflect. Thank God for that. Niko hated to think of the education she might have just gotten otherwise.

History gets reinterpreted as time goes on. Many times, the participants are lost in the retelling of the story.

I believe what I said yesterday. I don't know what I said, but I know what I think and I assume it's what I said.

All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.

All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.

Time's the thief of memory

The problem with snapshots is that they replace actual memories. You lock down the moment and it becomes all there is of it.

Historical memory is a potent weapon in fighting against the desert of organized forgetting and implies a rethinking of the role that artists, intellectuals, educators, youth and other concerned citizens can play in fostering a reawakening of America's battered public memories.

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.