Ellen Goodman Quotes

I wanted to put all my family stories down for my girls, and I remember everything so vividly. I just wanted to put everything down while I still can remember it all.

I urge you to pursue preserving your personal history to allow your children and grandchildren to know who you were as a child and what your hopes and dreams were.

From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.

To the children of yesterday, who have grown up and become parents, and to the children of today, who perhaps shout 'Tottigol,' I'd like to think that, for you, my career has become a fairytale for you to pass on.

I wish my grandparents were around to see my children.

I do hang on to things. I was so happy my father saved his army jacket. I grew up wearing that all through high school.

Family love can be a bore, but only when you are hearing it, never when you are relating it to the ones who will be carrying it out for you. A family without a storyteller or two has no way to make sense out of their past and no way to get a sense of themselves.

we all carry the Houses of our Youth inside, and our Parents, too, grown small enough to fit within our Hearts.

With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.

But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.

All those years and their moments— Crackling bacon, slamming car doors, Poems tried out on friends, Will be one more archive, One more shaky text.

I hate to think that all my current experiences will someday become stories with no point.

I associate times with certain music. It still is that for me. It's telling the story of our lives.

And my father left me a legacy of his handwriting through letters and a notebook. In the last two years of his life, when he was sick, he filled a notebook with his thoughts about me… There are times when I want to trade all those years that I was too busy to sit with my dad and chat with him, and trade all those years for one hug. But too late. But that's when I take out his letters and I read them, and the paper that touched his hand is in mine, and I feel connected to him.

The most important thing you leave behind is the stuff that turns into treasures when children find it

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

Memories are perhaps the best gifts of all.

Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us.

It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.

I love writing family stories.

Honor the community you come from. Tell their stories.

Yes, I'm often reminded of her, and in one of my array of pockets, I have kept her story to retell. It is one of the small legion I carry, each one extraordinary in its own right. Each one an attempt - an immense leap of an attempt - to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it.

All those moments, those memories. Everything that we are, compressed in just two or three kilos of paper — the weight of a human heart.

We gather the things we learned, and they don't nearly add up to fill the space of a life. You will miss the taste of Froot Loops. You will miss the sound of traffic. You will miss your back against his. You will miss him stealing the sheets. Do not ignore these things.

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.