Natasha Trethewey Quotes

It's my memory, and what happened between that moment 10 or 15 years ago and now, there's a lot of gray area.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

A lot of my past is gone from my mind.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

The past is where its supposed to be.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

All that I've lived I've forgotten, as if I'd vaguely heard it. All that I'll be reminds me of nothing, as if I'd lived and forgotten it.

But it's far too late for us; ring, hair, letters, photographs - all traces of our love will be scattered then, like an anagram.

And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen...our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself...and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds.

The years leech at a man's memories, even those he has vowed never to forget.

And what did I think when I was small and why did I forget? And what else will I forget when I grow older? And if you forget is it as if it never happened? Will none of the things you saw or thought or dreamed matter?

My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.

It is terrible how much has been forgotten, which is why, I suppose, remembering seems a holy thing.

The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present.

Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory.

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.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?