A Year Remembrance Quotes & Sayings

What follows is the sum and substance of a remarkable year in a great artist's life -
Alexander Wainwright. He was at the pinnacle of his career when his art took a strange turn and I began to fear he had become possessed by some devil. But I was only beginning to understand the power of his passionate and hungry spirit, which nearly devoured him in his search for his new art - and his new life.

James Helmsworth, [art dealer for Alexander Wainwright] in The Drawing Lesson.

Enter for the giveaway of ten autographed copies of The Drawing Lesson, the first in The Trilogy of Remembrance starting on July 31st until August 31st, 2014. — Mary E. Martin

We wear our lives
Like costumes
Use bills and coins like props
In an over budget production
That we cannot seem to stop
So it just goes on like this
As if we accept this
As if we've all become
Buddhas of mass production
Our brains rotting
Like teeth
Under the sweet
Unending bliss of false enlightenment. — Shane Koyczan

And what I said was I'll miss you,
What I meant to say was that I love you,
What I wanted to say was that I meant what I said
I miss you like I miss my own bed
after too many nights of sleeping on couches
or hardwood floors
Or sitting silently behind the doors
Of hotel rooms became wounds
Breathing life in to this loneliness
I miss you
Like a burn victim must miss their own skin
I miss you like a sad ending
Must miss someplace new to begin
Because some say that the highway becomes a flat line
if you travel it for too long
I can't tell if that's true or false,
But I'm racing down it towards you trying to find my
Pulse. — Shane Koyczan

I used to go down every year for the remembrance of Elvis' birthday. Memphis State College invited me to sit in the auditorium and speak to the people for one of those Elvis days. — Otis Blackwell

And ye, who have met with Adversity's blast, And been bow'd to the earth by its fury; To whom the Twelve Months, that have recently pass'd Were as harsh as a prejudiced jury - Still, fill to the Future! and join in our chime, The regrets of remembrance to cozen, And having obtained a New Trial of Time, Shout in hopes of a kindlier dozen. — Thomas Hood

So if anyone ever tells you:
You're not good enough!
You're not smart enough!
Give up your foolish dream!
If anyone ever tells you to quit,
You got to make them wear a diaper on their mouth
Because, man, they're just talking shit. — Shane Koyczan

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts ... .We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need - not all the time, surely, but from time to time - to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember - the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived. — Frederick Buechner

So men and women were born into workers
Because ideas like
Right and wrong
Get outweighed by need
Anytime you've got mouths to feed. — Shane Koyczan

During that night the blessed Antony told us this, too. 'A whole year long I prayed that the place of the righteous and of the sinners be revealed to me, and I saw a huge giant, high as the clouds and black. He had his hand stretched out to heaven, and beneath him there was a lake the size of a sea and I saw souls, flying like birds. 17. " 'Those flying above his hands and his head were being saved; they that were struck by his hands were falling into the lake. A voice came to me saying, "Those souls that you see flying above are the souls of the righteous, the ones that are being brought safely into Paradise; the others are they that are being dragged down to Hades, having followed the desires of the flesh and the remembrance of injuries." ' "* — John Wortley

(...)

That winter you left me snow-blind trying to find enough details that would let you know that even though some people have perfect sight,
those same people could try to paint you by numbers and they still wouldn't get you right.
You were Monet number two and Van Gogh number 6,
a mix tape of Hendrix and Leibowitz portraits.

It makes no sense to me that we were ever together.
And my makeshift weather reports were the closest I ever came to telling you how I felt.
But you were a lover of the minuscule,
you dealt best with details.
Weighing our relationship on scales you balanced us out, and always made me feel needed.

You always asked me what to wear,
and I would stare at you as if for a second I wouldn't answer.
Of course, I always did.
Hid my affections, and my response:
"wear that smile" I said.
That one you wear when you see me.
That one you wear to bed. — Shane L. Koyczan

Nobody told me about him [my grandfather], and he died when I was six, and yet within the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been born and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well. It is rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially for the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though children may not understand what is said and done before them, and have no interest in it at the time, and though they may forget it at once and for years, yet these things that they have seen and heard and not noticed have after all impressed themselves for ever on their minds, and when they are men and women come crowing back with surprising and often painful distinctness, and away frisk all the cherished little illusions in flocks. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

Remembrance is acknowledging that a life was lived ...
My father finally wrote out his memories for a reason. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real.
Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth. Stories about lives remembered bring us backward while allowing us to move forward. — Nina Sankovitch