{"quotes":[{"text":"The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.","author":"Marcus Aurelius","tags":["memory","time"],"id":5,"author_id":"Marcus+Aurelius"},{"text":"Sometimes we are written down in books. Or, someone tells a story in which our name figures. And so we live on, through someone else’s voice…These are the indelible marks others make of us, like the watermarks of high tides, names carved into barks, or stamps branded onto belongings. For what else is history but the collected voices of others, who sing a chorus of what once was. It is not words but voices that are the inscriptions seared onto pages, into minds, of the fragments others glean, as we live our lives in passing.Flitting and fl eeting, we rub off as we move through, and in our wake is cast the dust of the stars that we become. And sometimes it is caught on the fingers of others, and they press that gold to their lips, where it glistens, an eternal testimony to the fact that they adored us: So we, those of us whoremember, we grow more golden as we age, as if cast into statues that commemorate the splendor of those who loved us, and those we were privilegedto love.","author":"Samantha Bruce-Benjamin","tags":["love","memory","mourning"],"id":204,"author_id":"Samantha+Bruce-Benjamin"},{"text":"Lacking natural equilibrium, I used writing as an illustrative means to center myself in a world filled with haziness and uncertainty. My self-drafted obituary will not bemoan death but shall celebrate life by giving heartfelt thanks for all the people that brightened actuality with their kindness, friendship, noble acts of charity, and expressions of universal goodwill. It was a privilege to exist in this wrinkle of time with many people devoted to burnishing the sharpen edges of life. The heavens blessed me with many years to discover why it is beautiful to live and die in a world where the hills and wind, the rivers and seas, stars and moon, and revealing sunlight shall persevere.","author":"Kilroy J. Oldster","tags":["beautiful-life","beauty-of-life","beauty-of-nature","beauty-of-the-world","death","death-and-dying","essay-writing","essayist","memories","memories","memory","writers","writers-on-writing","writers","writing","writing-philosophy"],"id":281,"author_id":"Kilroy+J.+Oldster"},{"text":"You may ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnesses for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.","author":"Ford Madox Ford","tags":["explanation","history","memory"],"id":377,"author_id":"Ford+Madox+Ford"},{"text":"You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.","author":"Amy Tan","tags":["fiction","knowledge","memory","remembrance","understanding"],"id":660,"author_id":"Amy+Tan"},{"text":"We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.","author":"Gaston Bachelard","tags":["6","comfort","home","memory","safety","space"],"id":681,"author_id":"Gaston+Bachelard"},{"text":"I took up space. I was a collection of cells and memories, awkward limbs and clumsy fashion crimes; I was the repository of my parents' expectations and evidence of their disappointments.","author":"Robin Wasserman","tags":["cell","disappointment","expectations","life","living","memories","memory","parents"],"id":694,"author_id":"Robin+Wasserman"},{"text":"I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer -- and what trees and seasons smelled like -- how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.","author":"John Steinbeck","tags":["childhood","landscape","memory","plants","time"],"id":788,"author_id":"John+Steinbeck"},{"text":"I am a people watcher and I have a very good memory.","author":"Brian Jacques","tags":["memory","watch","yoel-goldenberg"],"id":808,"author_id":"Brian+Jacques"},{"text":"This is the worst of our ways of remembering--this tendency to prod the crust of anecdote in the hope of releasing a gush of piping-hot symbolism. ","author":"Kamila Shamsie","tags":["memory","symbolism"],"id":1019,"author_id":"Kamila+Shamsie"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":2341,"pages":235,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}