The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Tag: death, memory

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

It felt like the times were good, like we were remembering a time before Rachel died, even though things were never this good then, because they were just normal, and ordinary is never the kind if good you remember.

Vladimir Nabokov

IphWas a larvorium and a violet:A grave in Reason’s early spring. And yetIt missed the gist of the whole thing; it missedWhat mostly interests the preterist;For we die every day; oblivion thrivesNot on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,And our best yesterdays are now foul pilesOf crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.I’m ready to become a floweretOr a fat fly, but never, to forget.

People have two deaths: the first at the end of their lives, when they go away, and the second at the end of the memory of their lives, when all who remember them are gone. Then a person quits the world completely.

Life is like a clock, it goes round and round, until the battery dies. Unlike clocks when humans die, they are either dead for good or they are still alive in the minds of others. To live on after death one must make a name for himself, if one fails to make a name for himself, then he will die alone, and forgotten.

Gwendolyn Brooks

She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing “happens.” That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.

Mostly I couldn’t bear… the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.

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.

Gabriel García Márquez

Eran gentes de vidas lentas, a las cuales no se les veía volverse viejas, ni enfermarse ni morir, sino que iban desvaneciéndose poco a poco en su tiempo, volviéndose recuerdos, brumas de otra época, hasta que los asimilaba el olvido.

Gustave Flaubert

How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.

Arthur Schnitzler

Oh, we do not understand death, we never understand it; creatures are only truly dead when everyone else has died who knew them.

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.