Monique Wittig Quotes

Remember what I've told you. Remember me.

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

I'll never forget the first time I saw someone who had died. It was my grandfather. And I knelt next to his coffin. And all I could do was eye level was look at his hands. They were enormous hands. And all I could think was, 'Those hands dug freedom for me.'

A holiday is when you celebrate something that's all finished up, that happened a long time ago and now there's nothing left to celebrate but the dead.

We are the first to honour the memories of those who perished through slavery, by declaring August 1 as Emancipation Day.

It's very inconvenient because every time I finish, let's say, a chapter of a book, I think I'm going to ring Richard and then realize: Oh, Christ, I've buried him. I buried him last year.

I suppose the things you remember about someone who has died are the funny moments. Those are the ones that stand out.

It is not fun singing about losing somebody like that, but at the same time it was easy to write because the memories were so real and vivid and so much a part of who I am.

I think a lot of people want to be remembered the way they were, as opposed to the way they are now.

Laura Bush has the face of my mother when my mother was young. The face, the body, the voice. The first time I saw on TV Laura Bush, I got frozen because it was as if my mother was not dead. 'Oh, Mama,' I said, 'Mama.'

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

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.

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.

Time is never time at all. You can never ever leave without leaving a piece of youth. And our lives are forever changed. We will never be the same. The more you change, the less you feel.

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

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.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

I'm 47 now, and I'm at that stage where I'm still young but I'm not young. I'm not old but I'm getting old, and I have stuff at home that reminds me of people and places.

The word 'home', it seemed, once learned, was a hard one to forget.

I think you can only be nostalgic for something you've lost.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.

My mom was there, in some form, in some sense, in some universe. My mom was still my mom, even if she only lived in books and door locks and the smell of fried tomatoes and old paper. She lived.

Lord, keep my memory green.

Man minus the Machine is a slave; Man plus the Machine is a freeman.