Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

A good character is the best tombstone. Those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered. Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.

When you lose a person you love so much, surviving the loss is difficult.

When the people you love are gone, you’re alone.

That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

There are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

The death of my father is probably the biggest thing that I ever faced. Daddy and I were best friends.

There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

God tries you in certain, certain ways. Some people are rich, and they believe in God. They lose the money, things get hard, they get weak and quit going to church. Quit serving God like they did.

My wife is already in Heaven.

People don’t realize what they had till it’s gone. Like President Kennedy, there was no one like him, the Beatles, and my man Elvis Presley. I was the Elvis of boxing.

I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief at Diana’s loss, and gratitude for her all-too-short life. It is a chance to show to the whole world the British nation united in grief and respect.

Generally, the younger the victim, the greater the grief. Yet even when the elderly or infirm have been afforded merciful relief, their loved ones are rarely ready to let go.

I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.

If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

God knows what we are going through when we grieve, and He wants to assure us of His love and concern. He also wants us to turn to Him and bring our heartaches and burdens to Him.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

My recollection is – and I’d have to confirm this – but I don’t recall paying any money to go to law school.

Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.

Great grief does not of itself put an end to itself.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

You never get over losses. I’ve never gotten over one loss I’ve had in my career. They always stick with me.

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

My son has died of AIDS.

He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

Grief changes shape, but it never ends.

It is rather for us here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.

I remember when the candle shop burned down. Everyone stood around singing ‚Happy Birthday.‘

If it’s hard to remember, it’ll be difficult to forget.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

I just always wanted to study human behavior because every psychologist that I would talk to would tell me I was bipolar, and I know I’m not bipolar, so I had to perform a psychoanalysis on myself to find out that I have unresolved grief.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there’s a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they’re not the same, ever again.

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?

I really thought I was on the way out. My husband Blake saved my life. Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns. And then I am engulfed in shame.

When Clark Gable died, I cried for 2 days straight. I couldn’t eat or sleep.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

We fear that this moment will end, that we won’t get what we need, that we will lose what we love, or that we will not be safe. Often, our biggest fear is the knowledge that one day our bodies will cease functioning. So even when we are surrounded by all the conditions for happiness, our joy is not complete.

I’m always relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realize I’m listening to it.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

I said I would never wear my gold again because it would be insensitive and disrespectful to all the people who died and lost everything in Katrina.

I have an excellent memory, a most excellent memory.

Grief is the price we pay for love.

Nobody is forgotten when it is convenient to remember him.