Natasha Trethewey Quotes

But memory is an autumn leaf that murmurs a while in the wind and then is heard no more.

We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what really was, what it meant.

People without memory are putty.

History repeats itself over and over again, but most of us have short memories.

Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.

My biggest fear is losing memory because memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive is tied up in memory.

Well, I'm not able to work anymore as an actor and still at the level I would want to ... you start to lose your memory, you start to lose your confidence, you start to lose your invention. So, that's pretty much a closed book for me. And I'm grateful for the other things that have come into my life: grandkids, and restaurants and charity ... I've been doing it for 50 years. That's enough.

Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.

What would the future of man be if it were devoid of memory?

Remembrances last longer than present realities.

How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.

In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could--a look, a whisper, a moan--to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all.

A person without a memory is either a child or an amnesiac. A country without a memory is neither a child nor an amnesiac, but neither is it a country.

I used to take photographs just to remember people.

Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.

So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood; doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot; but it is gone forever from our imagination, and we can only believe in the joy of childhood.

If man has one good memory to go by, that may be enough to save him.

Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency.

All the lessons learned, unlearned; The young, who learned to read, now blind, Their eyes with an archaic film; The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune, Following the donkey's bray; These only remember to forget. But somewhere some word presses, On the high door of a skull and in some corner, Of an irrefrangible eye, Some old man memory jumps to a child - Spark from the days of energy. And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.

The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it.

Gossip is only the lack of a worthy memory.

Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.