Remembering A Place Quotes

“Soul Mates
I don't know how you are so familiar to me-or why it feels less like I am getting to know you and more as though I am remembering who you are. How every smile, every whisper brings me closer to the impossible conclusion that I have known you before, I have loved you before-in another time, a different place, some other existence.”

— Lang Leav

“This is the place I finally learned what it meant
to dance alone to the song you put in my chest.
Thanks for the symphony.
I can still hear it when I think of you,
and it is so much like remembering.”

— Caitlyn Siehl

“My youth was the most stubborn, peremptory part of myself. In my most relaxed moments, it governed my being. It pricked up its ears at the banter of eighteen-year-olds on the street. It frankly examined their bodies. It did not know its place: that my youth governed me with such ease didn't mean I was young. It meant I was divided as if housing a stowaway soul, rife with itches and yens which demanded a stern vigilance. I didn't live thoughtlessly in my flesh anymore. My body had not, in its flesh, fundamentally changed quite so much as it now could intuit the change that would only be dodged by an untimely death, and to know both those bodies at once, the youthful, and the old, was to me the quintessence of being middle-aged. Now I saw all my selves, even those that did not yet exist, and the task was remembering which I presented to others.”

— Susan Choi

“But this upland pass was the right place for remembering how, when I was young, I learned to feel for the harshness underneath every soft appearance.”

— Nuala O'Faolain

“I can no longer hear my voices, so I am a little lost. My suspicion is they would know far better how to tell this story. At least they would have opinions and suggestions and definite ideas as to what should go first and what should go last and what should go in the middle. They would inform me when to add detail, when to omit extraneous information, what was important and what was trivial. After so much time slipping past, I am not particularly good at remembering these things myself and could certainly use their help. A great many events took place, and it is hard for me to know precisely where to put what. And sometimes I'm unsure that incidents I clearly remember actually did happen. A memory that seems one instant to be as solid as stone, the next seems as vaporous as a mist above the river. That's one of the major problems with being crazy: you're just naturally uncertain about things. (9)”

— John Katzenbach

“Time Does Not Bring Relief
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,-so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

“His reaction to the idea was not simple. He felt a great warmth that they should want to give him a party and at the same time he quaked inwardly remembering the last one they had given.
Now everything fell into place-Mack's question and the silences when he was about. He thought of it a lot that night sitting beside his desk. He glanced about considering what things would have to be locked up. He knew the party was going to cost him plenty.”

— John Steinbeck

“But in every case, out of all the cells you've been in, your first cell is a very special one, the place where you first encountered others like yourself, doomed to the same fate. All your life you will remember it with an emotion that you otherwise experience only in remembering your first love. And those people, who shared with you the floor and air of that stone cubicle during those days when you rethought your entire life, will from time to time be recollected by you as members of your own family.
Yes, in those days they were your only family.
What you experience in your first interrogation cell parallels nothing in your entire previous life or your whole subsequent life”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Isn't it weird," I said, "the way you remember things, when someone's gone?"
What do you mean?"
I ate another piece of waffle. "When my dad first died, all I could think about was that day. It's taken me so long to be able to think back to before that, to everything else."
Wes was nodding before I even finished. "It's even worse when someone's sick for a long time," he said. "You forget they were ever healthy, ever okay. It's like there was never a time when you weren't waiting for something awful to happen."
But there was," I said. "I mean, it's only been in the last few months that I've started remembering all this good stuff, funny stuff about my dad. I can't believe I ever forgot it in the first place."
You didn't forget," Wes said, taking a sip of his water. "You just couldn't remember right then. But now you're ready to, so you can."
I thought about this as I finished off my waffle.”

— Sarah Dessen

“Sing to me," she said. "That would be valiant, to raise your voice in this dark, lonely place, and it will be useful as well. Sing to me, sing loudly-drown out my dreams, keep me from remembering whatever wants me to remember it. Sing to me, my lord prince, if it please you. It may not seem a hero's task, but I would be glad of it.”

— Peter S. Beagle

“Then he took the pages, smoothed them with the palm of his hand, and fixed them with pins to the walls. So that now, if he sat looking down upon Grape Street, the letters and images encircled him. And it was while he sat here, scarcely moving, that he was in hell and no one knew it. At such times the future became so clear that it was as if he were remembering it, remembering it in place of the past which he could no longer describe. But there was in any case no future and no past, only the unspeakable misery of his own self.”

— Peter Ackroyd

“I'm really not hungry," she repeated, lifting the coffee cup and inhaling the fragrant steam before sipping.
"Just a few bites," he cajoled, taking his own place beside her. "You need to keep up your strength for tonight."
She gave him a heated, slumberous look, remembering her fantasy. "Why? Are you planning something special?"
"I suppose I am," he said consideringly. "It's special every time we make love.”

— Linda Howard

“Again and again a man would tell me about early childhood feelings of emotional exuberance, of unrepressed joy, of feeling connected to life and to other people, and then a rupture happened, a disconnect, and that feeling of being loved, of being embraced, was gone. Somehow the test of manhood, men told me, was the willingness to accept this loss, to not speak it even in private grief. Sadly, tragically, these men in great numbers were remembering a primal moment of heartbreak and heartache: the moment that they were compelled to give up their right to feel, to love, in order to take their place as patriarchal men.”

— Bell Hooks

“This is the last time I would ever visit the cemetery or my wife's grave, but I didn't want to expend too much effort in trying to remember it. As I said, this is the place where she's never been anything but dead. There's not much value in remembering that.”

— John Scalzi

“Listen, listen!" I interrupted her. "Forgive me if I tell you something else ... I tell you what, I can't help coming here to-morrow, I am a dreamer; I have so little real life that I look upon such moments as this now, as so rare, that I cannot help going over such moments again in my dreams. I shall be dreaming of you all night, a whole week, a whole year. I shall certainly come here to-morrow, just here to this place, just at the same hour, and I shall be happy remembering today. This place is dear to me already. I have already two or three such places in Petersburg. I once shed tears over memories ... like you ... Who knows, perhaps you were weeping ten minutes ago over some memory ... But, forgive me, I have forgotten myself again; perhaps you have once been particularly happy here ...”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“How did you know He was God?' Gamache asked.
'When does a bush that burns become a Burning Bush?' Em asked and Gamache nodded. 'My despair disappeared. The grief remained, of course, but I knew then that the world wasn't a dark and desperate place. I was so relieved. In that moment I found hope. This strnager with the sign had given it to me. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but suddenly the gloom was lifted.'
She paused a moment, remembering, a smile on her face.”

— Louise Penny

“The country is too often assumed to be a backward place: The First World has trouble remembering that Haitians were two centuries ahead of us in abolishing slavery and in extending full rights of citizenship to everyone, regardless of race.”

— Madison Smartt Bell

“I am lying in the same bed where my mother died so long ago; on the same mattress,
beneath the same black wool coverlet she wrapped us in to sleep. I slept beside her, her
little girl, in the special place she made for me in her arms.
I think I can still feel the calm rhythm of her breathing; the palpitations and sighs that
soothed my sleep ... I think I feel the pain of her death ... But that isn't true.
Here I lie, flat on my back, hoping to forget my loneliness by remembering those times.
Because I am not here just for a while. And I am not in my mother's bed but in a black box
like the ones for burying the dead. Because I am dead.
I sense where I am, but I can think ...”

— Juan Rulfo

“In the street he drew a deep breath. He was free. Free from recollection and anticipation. Free, for an hour or two, to refuse to admit the existence of the past or future. Free to live only now and here, in the place where his body happened at each instant to be. Free
but the boast was idle; he went on remembering. Escape was not so easy a matter.”

— Aldous Huxley

“When we die, our bodies turn to dust," he says. "If you were nobody of consequence, you're forgotten unless you do something worth remembering." When he looks my way, I purse my lips and look down. "Otherwise, you're just another place marker in the ground. These buildings will rot here, their bodies are above the ground taunting us with what we did wrong as a people. Reminding us of the evil we're capable of. They are constant.”

— Celia Mcmahon

“A process of aging had taken place in him that was so rapid and critical that soon he was being treated as one of those useless great-grandfathers who wander about the bedroom like shades, dragging their feet, remembering better times aloud, and whom no one bother about or remembers really until the morning they find them dead in their bed.”

— Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez

“Perhaps it was that I wanted to see what I had learned, what I had read, what I had imagined, that I would never be able to see the city of London without seeing it through the overarching scrim of every description of it I had read before. When I turn the corner into a small, quiet, leafy square, am I really seeing it fresh, or am I both looking and remembering? [ ... ]
This is both the beauty and excitement of London, and its cross to bear, too. There is a tendency for visitors to turn the place into a theme park, the Disney World of social class, innate dignity, crooked streets, and grand houses, with a cavalcade of monarchs as varied and cartoony as Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and, at least in the opinion of various Briths broadhseets, Goofy.
They come, not to see what London is, or even what it was, but to confirm a kind of picture-postcard view of both, all red telephone kiosks and fog-wreathed alleyways.”

— Anna Quindlen

“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for hourse and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory
what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our "flooding.”

— Toni Morrison

“Magnus remembered a town in Peru whose Quechua name meant "quiet place." He recalled even more vividly being obscenely drunk and unhappy over his heartbreak of that time, and the maudlin thoughts that had recurred to him over the years, like an unwanted guest slipping in through his doors: that there was no peace for such as he, no quiet place, and there never would be.
Except he found himself remembering lying in bed with Alec-all of their clothes on, lounging on the bed on a lazy afternoon, Alec laughing, head thrown back, the marks Magnus had left on his throat very plain to see.”

— Sarah Rees Brennan

“It's not true that your life flashes before your eyes when you die. At least, not all of it. Some of your life might flash. Other portions of your life it might take you years and years to recall. That, I think, is the function of Hell: It's a place of remembering. Beyond that, the purpose of Hell is not so much to forget the details of our lives as it is to forgive them.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

“And what other kind of man would you want leading you into battle?" he says, reading my Noise. "What other kind of man is suitable for war?"
A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes monsters of men.
"Wrong," says the Mayor. "It's war that makes us men in the first place. Until there's war, we are only children."
Another blast of the horn comes roaring down at us, so loud it nearly takes our heads off and it puts the army off its stride for a second or two.
We look up the road to the bottom of the hill. We see Spackle torches gathering there to meet us.
"Ready to grow up, Todd?" the Mayor asks.”

— Patrick Ness

“Our souls do not like stagnation. Our souls aspire toward growth, that is, toward remembering all that we have forgotten due to our trip to this place, the earth.”

— Malidoma Patrice Some

“If you truly love someone, don't waste your time finding reasons to hate them. Spend it remembering why you love them in the first place.”

— Jinxx

“I believe in living each day as it comes, to the best of my ability. When it's done, I put it away, remembering that there will be a tomorrow to take it's place. If I have any philosophy, that's it. To me it's not a fatalistic attitude.”

— Ginger Rogers

“Somewhere along the journey of remembering who we really are, we may find ourselves in a very uncomfortable space, a void in which we realize that we haven't totally let go of our old beliefs, and on the other hand we have yet to fully plug into the new truths we have discovered. This awkward "place of mind" can bring on an internal crisis of uncertainty, instability, confusion, frustration, and a most unspeakable despair as the "dark night" sets in and makes its presence felt.”

— Nicholas Schmidt

“It is worth remembering (though there is nothing that we can do about it) that the world as it really is may easily be a far nastier place than it would be if scientific materialism were the whole truth and nothing but the truth about it.”

— C. D. Broad

“Today, refuse to see yourself as a recipient of negative vibrations or as a victim of subtle or gross influence around you. Practice broadcasting the high vibrations of your inner radiance remembering all the while that the place upon which you stand is holy simply because you are standing there.”

— Michael Beckwith

“It is strange how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering. It's a safety place. Everyone must have one, although I never heard a man tell of it.”

— John Steinbeck

“And from that hour his poor maimed spirit, only remembering the place where it had broken its wings, cancelled the dream through which it had since groped, and knew of nothing beyond the Marshalsea.”

— Charles Dickens

“When we forgive someone, we do not forget the hurtful act, as if forgetting came along with the forgiveness package, the way strings come with a violin. Begin with the basics. If you forget, you will not forgive at all. You can never forgive people for things you have forgotten about. You need to forgive precisely because you have not forgotten what someone did; your memory keeps the pain alive long after the hurt has stopped. Remembering is the storage of pain. It is why you need to be healed in the first place.”

— Lewis B. Smedes

“When something in a sequence is edited, if you repeat an image, but in a different place, the effect is different. Because the brain is remembering, and the different juxtaposition triggers other memories, thoughts, ideas, and so on.”

— Lynne Tillman