• "There are years that ask questions and years that answer."

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

• "So much of any year is flammable,/ lists of vegetables, partial poems./ Orange swirling flame of days,/ so little is a stone."

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year”

• "Every idea I have is nostalgia."

Mary Szybist, from “The Troubadours Etc.” Incarnadine: Poems

• "Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future."

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

• "He has tried to be true to the moment;/ is there another way of being/ true to the self?"

Louise Glück, Parable Of Faith

• “The times are growing so dark,” he told her distantly, “that we must try as best we can to cling to the memory of brightness.”

Salman Rushdie, from Shalimar the Clown

• "In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."

Milan Kundera

• Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t exist."

Rebecca Solnit, from “Apricots,” The Faraway Nearby

• "Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present."

Mario Vargas Llosa, from The Storyteller

• "My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me."

Imam al-Shafi’i

• Things arise and she lets them come;/ things disappear and she lets them go./ She has but doesn’t possess,/ acts but doesn’t expect./ When her work is done, she forgets it./ That is why it lasts forever."

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, verse 2

• "A place is not only a geographical area; it’s also a state of mind. And trees are not just trees; they are the ribs of childhood."

Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Journal of an Ordinary Grief’ (1973), trans. Ibrahim

• "My memory is like a pomegranate. Shall I open it over you and let it scatter, seed by seed: red pearls befitting a farewell that asks nothing of me except forgetfulness?"

Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

• "these months speak years."

Danielle Collobert, from Notebooks: 1956-1978

• "Proust says memory is of two kinds./ There is the daily struggle to recall/ where we put our reading glasses/ and there is a deeper gust of longing/ that comes up from the bottom/ of the heart/ involuntary./ At sudden times./ For sudden reasons."

Anne Carson, “Wildly Constant”

• "It makes me tremble./ What./ To think back. I remember exactly how I thought life would be."

Anne Carson, from The Beauty of the Husband; “Sad Severe Tango Dance Of Love And Death…,”

• "How sweet the past is, no matter how wrong, or how sad.

How sweet is yesterday’s noise." Charles Wright, from “The Southern Cross,” in The Southern Cross (Random House, 1981)

• "Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it wont be memory because it wont know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be. –Yes […] Between grief and nothing I will take grief."

William Faulkner from Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee Jerusalem]

• "How many futures — (how many deaths I can die?)"

Sylvia Plath, from the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

• "‘Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair,’ the theologian Walter Brueggeman noted. It’s an extraordinary statement, one that reminds us that through hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope... Amnesia leads to despair in many ways. The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view. In other words, when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change. Those who think that way don’t remember raids on gay bars when being queer was illegal or rivers that caught fire when unregulated pollution peaked in the 1960s or that there were, worldwide, 70 percent more seabirds a few decades ago and, before the economic shifts of the Reagan Revolution, very, very few homeless people in the United States. Thus, they don’t recognize the forces of change at work... One of the essential aspects of depression is the sense that you will always be mired in this misery, that nothing can or will change. It’s what makes suicide so seductive as the only visible exit from the prison of the present. There’s a public equivalent to private depression, a sense that the nation or the society rather than the individual is stuck. Things don’t always change for the better, but they change, and we can play a role in that change if we act. Which is where hope comes in, and memory, the collective memory we call history."

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

• "For we can never/ know in advance what is pertinent/ Sometimes not even afterwards/ What was it that happened to us"

Göran Sonnevi, from Mozart’s Third Brain, transl. by Rika Lesser (Yale University Press, 2009)

• "Only through feeling does exactness/ come, I understand later"

Göran Sonnevi, from Mozart’s Third Brain, transl. by Rika Lesser (Yale University Press, 2009)

• "But it’s one of the few things I remember distinctly, in sequence, because the rest of the night now seems to me, as I let it return in memory, a lake without beginning or end, where every reflection still shines, but every shore is lost, and the breeze is illegible."

Alessandro Baricco, from The Young Bride (Europa Editions, 2016)

• "Something lay buried in the ground. Under grass. Under twenty-three years of June rain./ A small forgotten thing./ Nothing the world would miss."

Arundhati Roy, from The God of Small Things

• “The month was November, the leaves had turned to a brilliant red. What I wanted most was time to absorb something which I already knew I should never forget.”

Vita Sackville-West, from “Note of Another Country: Tuscany,” Country Notes (M. Joseph Ltd., 1939)

• “Whatever I was, whatever I wasn’t — it’s all in what I am. Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn’t want — all of this has shaped me. Whatever I loved, or stopped loving — in me it’s the same nostalgia.”

Fernando Pessoa (1880-1935), from “Oxfordshire” (6 August 1931)