But The Memory Remains Quotes & Sayings

Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter- this is what life is, herein lies its task. I have come to recognize this. This idea has entered into my flesh and blood. Yes, it's true! That head which created, lived b the hightes life of art, which acknowledged and had come to know the highest demands of the spirit, that head has been cut from my shoulders. Memory remains, and the images I have created and still not molded in flesh. They will leave their harsh mark on me, it is true! But my heart is left me, and the same flesh and blood which likewise can love and suffer and desire and remember, and this is, after all, life. on voit le soleil! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It is like a beautiful sunset you see once in your life, one you swear you will never forget as long as you live. And you never do forget, but you never have a reason to restore the memory - so it remains hidden inside. Until one day, for no apparent reason, you remember that sunset. You recall the way your skin felt as the sun brushed across it, the way the colors painted the sky. You wonder why it took you so long to go back to that place again, swearing you won't take so long next time. Only you do forget the memory and you may or may not ever relive it again. — J.A. Saare

It is not however, adulthood itself, but parenthood that forms the glass shroud of memory. For there is an interesting quirk in the memory of women. At 30, women see their adolescence quite clearly. At 30 a woman's adolescence remains a facet fitting into her current self ... At 40, however, memories of adolescence are blurred. Women of this age look much more to their earlier childhood for memories of themselves and of their mothers. This links up to her typical parenting phase. — Terri E Apter

Myriads of sounds so filled my mind and heart that it's difficult to explain them. The most amazing one, however, was the angels' wings. I didn't see them, but the sound was a beautiful, holy melody with a cadence that seemed never to stop. The swishing resounded as if it was a form of never-ending praise. As I listened I simply knew what it was. A second sound remains, even today, the single, most vivid memory I have of my entire heavenly experience. I call it music, but it differed from anything I had ever heard or ever expect to hear on the earth. The melodies of praise filled the atmosphere. The nonstop intensity and endless variety overwhelmed me. The praise was unending, but the most remarkable thing to me was that hundreds of songs were being sung at the same time - all of them worshiping God. As I approached the large, magnificent gate, I heard them from every direction and realized that each voice praised God. — Don Piper

I have just repeated word for word the oath taken by George Washington 200 years ago, and the Bible on which I placed my hand is the Bible on which he placed his. It is right that the memory of Washington be with us today, not only because this is our Bicentennial Inauguration, but because Washington remains the Father of our Country. — George H. W. Bush

Whenever an animal is frightened, particularly a cat, it runs away to get over its disgrace. In the case of a feline such an experience of disgrace remains forever in its character and memory. Fear may take some time to teach, but once it has been learned it can rarely be shaken out of a creature. In the case of a man, thought can be re-educated and through thought his own character can be recast. But animals who are mostly victims of their own habits, unless we, their man-friends, take infinite pains, are rarely de-habituated. More than man, an animal's character is but the sum total of its habits. These are formed by violent emotions such as fear. — Dhan Gopal Mukerji

It's been a long time since humans were prey animals. A hundred thousand years or so. But buried deep in our genes the memory remains: the awareness of the gazelle, the instinct of the antelope. The wind whispers through the grass. A shadow flits between the trees. And up speaks the little voice that goes. Shhhh, it's close now. Close. — Rick Yancey

I try to keep my sitters moving and talking, to make them forget they are being painted. This has nothing to do with extracting intimate secrets or confessions, but rather with establishing, in motion, an essential image of the kind that remains in memory or recurs in dreams. — Oskar Kokoschka

The same is true of stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But [the extermination of proper place names] (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a 'suspended symbolic order.' The habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, no, here 'there isn't any place special, except for my own home, that's all ... There isn't anything.' Nothing 'special': nothing that is marked, opened up by a memory or a story, signed by something or someone else. Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only 'places in which one can no longer believe in anything. — Michel De Certeau

What if she remembered the fortress wrong? What if she climbed up and the sun did not come out? What if it did, but it felt the same as any other sunrise?
She could not risk tainting that precious memory. She clutched the locket around her neck, the one Radu had given her to replace her old leather pouch. Inside were the dusty remains of an evergreen sprig and a flower from these same mountains. She had carried them with her as talismans through the lands of her enemies. Now she was home, and still in the land of her enemies.
She would climb that peak one day, soon. When it was all hers. She would come back, and she would rebuild the fortress to honor Wallachia. — Kiersten White

At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock wave of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn't immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the mast, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it. — Anthony Marra

You know, O friend, any meeting is surely more than parting. There is emptiness before meeting someone, just nothing, but there is no longer emptiness after parting. After having met someone once, it is impossible to part completely. A person remains in the memory, as a part of the memory. The person created that part and that part lives, sometimes coming into contact with its creator. Otherwise, how would we sense those dear to us from a distance? — Evgenij Vodolazkin

How long lived our memory of you when you are gone? Because in the end, that is the only measure. In the end, when life's last flickers fade, all that remains is memory. Richness, in the final measure, is not weighed in gold coins, but in the number of people you have touched, the tears of those who mourn your passing, and the fond remembrances of those who continue to celebrate your life. - Drizzt Do'Urden — R.A. Salvatore

There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve
even in pain
the authentic relationship. Further more, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched ... Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.
Even the anatomy of a river was laid bare. Not far downstream was a dry channel where the river had run once, and part of the way to come to know a thing is through its death. But years ago I had known the river when it flowed through this now dry channel, so I could enliven its stony remains with the waters of memory. — Norman Maclean

The spectacle takes us away from our routines. For at least a time, we feel part of something big, colorful, exciting. It is perhaps understandable that civilians are often more enthusiastic during wartime than soldiers who have experienced battle. The soldiers know that war is often boring and dirty as well as terrifying and colorful. Even so, after some years, an old soldier like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., could brush aside his earlier description of the pain, boredom, and death of war and declare that "its message was divine." The stench disappears, but the spectacle remains in memory's eye. — Nel Noddings

...I believe that nothing that once was can be completely undone. Even if destroyed in the material world and forgotten by men, it remains and will remain alive in the memory of an infinite being for which the past as well as the future is always present, and that is thus the greatest, the only true historian, and the keeper of the eternal tradition of which even our best human traditions ...are but shadows and images. — Paul Oskar Kristeller

Time thins the cloth of memory. As the ages pass, its rich colors fade. Strong wool is beaten by the elements until the pattern of its lesson disintegrates, leaving holes in the truth it was meant to carry on. Even the stains of blood bend and bleed, leaving but faded blotches without meaning, mere shadows of lessons that came before, their warnings lost within the obscure impression that remains. — Melissa McPhail

Thinking about the word "coffee" makes you think about the color black and also about breakfast and the taste of bitterness, that's a function of a cascade of electrical impulses rocketing around a real physical pathway inside your brain, which links a set of neurons that encode the concept of coffee with others containing the concepts of blackness, breakfast, and bitterness. That much scientists know. But how exactly a collection of cells could "contain" a memory remains among the deepest conundrums of neuroscience. — Joshua Foer

True, more than a half of the green graves in the Grafton cemetery are marked "Unknown," and sometimes it occurs that one thinks of the contradiction involved in "honoring the memory" of him of whom no memory remains to honor; but the attempt seems to do no great harm to the living, even to the logical. — Ambrose Bierce

Of these years nought remains in memory but the sad feeling that we have advanced and only grown older. — Max Muller

It was in Alexandria, during the six hundred years beginning around 300 B.C., that human beings, in an important sense, began the intellectual adventure that has led us to the shores of space. But of the look and feel of that glorious marble city, nothing remains. Oppression and the fear of learning have obliterated almost all memory of ancient Alexandria. — Anonymous

Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life. While there remains even a plaintive memory, a person cannot be cut off, dead. And he thought, It's a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man's life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness. — John Steinbeck

If there were no life beyond this earth-life, some people I have known would gain immortality by the nobility of our memory of them. With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution of happiness, strength, and understanding to my being remains to sustain me in an altered world. — Helen Keller

The memory of past favors is like a rainbow, bright, vivid, and beautiful; but it soon fades away. The in memory of injuries is engraved on the heart, and remains forever. — Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow ... In this world - as I have known it - we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt ... There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that ... is always but a vain and floating appearance ... A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains - but a clot of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing. — Joseph Conrad

Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of man, without his vices. This praise, which would be unmeaning flattery if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just tribute to the memory of Botswain, a dog. — George Gordon Byron

All over him a flaking, and the flakes tiny creatures, clawed and with mouths, all light, that crawled into the cracks that had been opened in him, seeking bone. Only when a shadow of cloud passed over did the many mouths of the light desist.

Tries to hold it, the shadow; to make at least the memory of it last on his flesh, and cool and calm the furious activity all over the surface of him. But his mind lets the cloud slide away like everything else it has held. All that remains in his skull, behind the blind eyes, is sky, and that too burns, shakes out flame. Cloud after cloud rolls over, touches, cools, and is gone. Beyond hold. — David Malouf

It was a school photograph and although the face was immediately recognisable she couldn't have pulled it up from her memory, it had long ago been replaced by the bloat of decomposed flesh. Caleb wore the same uniform that she had, shared the same classes and, possibly, aspirations but that's where the similarities with his life ended. On the occasions that Eleanor had forced herself to look at him she'd taste again the cascade of emotions that both defied and defiled her. Caleb was her 'safe word', the boy who had experienced all of the world's horror so she wouldn't have to.
Her hands steadier, she slid the remains back into the box and piled her life back on top of it. — Karen Long

The evolution of Parkour sort of happens with time and age as you change, and the body has a certain memory of Parkour. There is a sort of thing that remains intrinsic, but then the choreography will adapt to whatever the necessity of each particular film needs. — David Belle

My short-term factual memory can be like water; events are a brief disturbance on the surface and then it closes back up again, as if nothing ever touched it. But it's a strange fact that my long-term memory remains strong, perhaps because it recorded events when my mind was unaffected. My emotional memory is intact too, perhaps because feelings are recorded and stored in a different place than facts. The things that happened deeper in the past, and deeper in the breast, are still there for me, under the water.
I won 1,098 games, and eight national championships, and coached in four different decades. But what I see are not the numbers. I see their faces.
'Pat should get a tattoo!' The kids laughed. 'What kind should she get?'
'A heart. She should get a heart.'
Little did they know. They are the tattoos. — Pat Summitt

A city finds its life through the humans who inhabit it. When they go, what is truly left? Just silent stones, witnesses to the history but mute in its telling, remaining thus while slowly turning to rubble. It saddens me that life's moments are thus lost, that one cannot experience the past in the same rich vibrancy as the present. You live the moments and then relegate them to memory, now just two-dimensional shadows, pictures without depth, stripped of their purest emotion, their tactile connections no longer accessible. You try to recall, but can bring back only a fraction of the event lived. The rest is gone, never to be as full and complete as it was in that one place at that one time. That was what I thought as I studied these stone remains; that all the tangible things experienced here abide somewhere in time, but can never again be wholly re-animated, now just ghosts imbedded in the crumbling walls and in the fading memories of those who once lived here. — Michael Puttonen

Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man. — H. Rider Haggard

It is a balsam," answered Don Quixote, "the receipt of which I have in my memory, with which one need have no fear of death, or dread dying of any wound; and so when I make it and give it to thee thou hast nothing to do when in some battle thou seest they have cut me in half through the middle of the body - as is wont to happen frequently, - but neatly and with great nicety, ere the blood congeal, to place that portion of the body which shall have fallen to the ground upon the other half which remains in the saddle, taking care to fit it on evenly and exactly. Then thou shalt give me to drink but two drops of the balsam I have mentioned, and thou shalt see me become sounder than an apple. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

His face - what would it have become? While calling him back in memory I have been haunted by the idea of the unalterable features of those who have died in youth. Borne away from them by the years, we - with our time-troubled looks and diminished alertness - have submitted to many a gradual detriment of change. But the young poet of twenty-five years ago remains his world-discovering self. His futureless eyes encounter ours from the faintly smiling portrait, unconscious of the privilege and deprivation of never growing old, unconscious of the dramatic illusion of completeness that he is destined to create. — Siegfried Sassoon

By some miracle the cairn remained untouched by the flames, solid as the day I'd built it, a tiny oasis amid the burn scar. I removed the cap rock. I placed the bone inside. I felt the enormity of his loss once more. The pain of it never does fade entirely, never will - no doubt it disfigured me in ways that will endure for what remains of my life - but at last I found a place to put it where it wouldn't eat me alive. My devotion to his memory led me there, the place I venerate above all others on earth, my little voodoo shrine to the lost and the damned, as wild and remote as the country of grief itself. — Philip Connors

The moments of beauty, the moments when you feel blessed, are only moments; but memory and imagination, treasuring them, can string them together ... Everything else passes away; that which you love remains. — Brian Morton

The doctor's wife was not particularly keen on the tendency of proverbs to preach, nevertheless something of this ancient lore must have remained in her memory, the proof being that she filled two of the bags they had brought with beans and chick peas, Keep what is of no use at the moment, and later you will find what you need, one of her grandmothers had told her, the water in which you soak them will also serve to cook them, and whatever remains from the cooking will cease to be water, but will have become broth. It is not only in nature that from time to time not everything is lost and something is gained. — Jose Saramago

But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind. — Margaret Atwood