Unspoken Memories Quotes

In my experience, the men of World War II, the vets of Vietnam, even guys coming back from Iraq, are loath to talk about their experiences. And the survivors of the Holocaust, particularly, are often very close-mouthed about their stories, even to their own children.

My dad served in the Air Force as ground crew for several years, and doesn't really talk about it. I know that it's there. I think my main thing about direct or indirect experiences as near to home as it were is the idea of self-sacrifice really.

It's daunting to go back through the past, to read tweets and come across Facebook profiles of people who have passed away. It stirs up memories you never actually shared online or never will share online. It was a very emotional process.

Some things we must pass over in silence.

Over the years, I've come to realize that sometimes a ghost isn't always a ghost. Sometimes, telling a ghost story is a way to talk about something else present in the air, taking up space beside you. It can also be a manifestation of intuition, or something you've known in your bones but haven't yet been able to accept.

Let the veil of silence fall presently over what happened afterwards. Silence, too, can speak out.

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.

There are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret, Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together.

In any novel I write, I have in my mind several things which happened in the protagonist's past which I never mention in the book.

There are things that I don't like to talk about directly. There are relationships that I am in and have been in that I've written about in a slightly more abstract way, talking about how it affected me but not so much dealing with the other people involved.

One of the most unsettling things about 'Monologue' is its long silences, in which the man sits alone, staring into the middle distance, without grip of his narrative, lost to the past.

My second year of Ryerson, I still lived at my folks' place. I went to the attic to find some prop for a play I was doing. And I found a scrapbook dedicated to my father's years at Ryerson as an actor. He never mentioned it.

My parents were mourning the death of my sister. She was killed in a car accident before I was born, and I didn't know she existed until I was 13 or 14 years old. I knew I was growing up in a house where people were angry and sad.

I left a lot of personal stuff out of 'Donnie Brasco.'

Most older people don't talk about the past so they won't have to admit that their life ran on the wrong rail.

My own memories are packed tightly away. I very rarely bring them out for viewing.

If I told you about all the stories I don't tell, I would be violating the very boundaries I set for myself.

My mother's favorite photograph was one of herself at twenty-four years old, unbearably beautiful, utterly glamorous, in a black-straw cartwheel hat, dark-red lipstick, and a smart black suit, her notepad on a cocktail table. I know nothing about that woman.

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

With 'Hollow Circus,' I used a family story that haunted me as a kid, one of those anecdotes about a family member that would rarely be spoken of in front of the children.

Not only did I avoid speaking of Salinger; I resisted thinking about him. I did not reread his letters to me. The experience had been too painful.

It is the stories we don't get, the ones we miss, pass over, fail to recognize, don't pick up on, that will send us to hell.

I know exactly what my songs are about and I try not to tell people, because a friend of mine really loves 'Stop Your Tears' and I made the mistake of telling her what it's about one day. Now she has to distract herself and look elsewhere when I sing the last verse about being at the river with the baby, because she knows too much.

Smiles form the channels of a future tear.