Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of [my husband] and me. Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me.

Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.

People don't become better when they're dead; you just talk about them as if they are.

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

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

My grandfather was dying, and told the family he had decided to die. ... At that moment I wanted so badly to write and tell him that he was never going to die, that somehow he would always be present in my life, because he had a theory that death didn't exist, only forgetfulness did. He believed that if you can keep people in your memory, they will live forever. That's what he did with my grandmother.

The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we're gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure.

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death

You have to remember that goodbyes are temporary because no one ever really leaves and nothing lasts forever. People are always with us, because they are in our hearts and in our memory. The only thing we can depend on is change... Life is just a series of moments -- a string of pearls that make up the necklace of your life and so every once in a while, to complete the circle, you need to end a chapter.

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.

If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.

I like to think that people live on in other people's memories.

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

It is a bitter thought to an avaricious spirit that by and by all these accumulations must be left behind. We can only carry away from this world the flavor of our good or evil deeds.

Lord, keep my memory green.

I told him they built a statue of Schultz, and then he said that a monument is cold comfort to a dead man, and then I said that the statue was built not for Schultz, but for us--to remind us how to be human.

Play Mozart in memory of me - and I will hear you.

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on.

In the end, we'll all become stories.

There's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year.

There is nothing steadfast in life but our memories. We are sure of keeping intact only that which we have lost.

Our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories.