#memo

You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#friends #pity #school #schoolmates #memoir

Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea. ↗

— Sydney Smith

#memoir

What were you like," I asked her. "we're you happy? Or were you smiling because they told you to? ↗

— Gabrielle Zevin

#memoir

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August] ↗

— William Faulkner

#nostalgia #nostalgia

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#loneliness

Loss alone is but the wounding of a heart; it is memory that makes it our ruin. ↗

— Brian Ruckley

#loss #memory #mourning #moving-on #mourning

The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map. ↗

— Fern Schumer Chapman

#memoir #memory #mothers #holocaust

Smells, I think, may be the last thing on earth to die. ↗

— Fern Schumer Chapman

#memory #scent #smell #holocaust

Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments. ↗

— Michel de Montaigne

#memory #judgement

The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less. ↗

— Roberto Bolaño

#memory #pain #transformation #transformation