Postcard Memories Quotes

Your memory creates postcard images, but it doesn't really comprehend the world at all. That's why a landscape is so affected by the mood of the person looking at it. In it a person sees his own inner, transitory moments. Wherever he looks, he sees nothing but himself.

I find things hidden in books: dried flowers, locks of hair, tickets, labels, receipt, invoices, photographs, postcards, all manner of cards. I find letters, unpublished works by the ordinary, the anguished, the illiterate. Clumsily written or eloquent, they are love letters, everyday letters, secret letters and mundane letters talking about fruit and babies and tennis matches, from people signing themselves as Majorie or Jean....I can't bring myself to dispose of these snippets and snapshots of lives that once meant (or still do mean) so much.

Those moments aren't ours any more. They're shut up in a box, buried at the back of a cupboard, out of reach. They're frozen like on a postcard or a calendar. The colours will end up disappearing, fading. They're forbidden to our memories and our words.

Word – An eternal power, In a wrong place at a wrong time, Inflicts more pain than a weapon

Filled to the brim, Spilling, Splashing all the way, Drenching the one who carries it, Like an overfilled vessel… His heart bursts inside him, While he drives past her lane.

feel like some sense of memory makes us attracted to places our ancestors knew, celebrate dates that were important in the past, and become drawn to people whose family once crossed paths with ours without our even knowing it. Call it psychogenealogy, or cellular memory . . . all I know is, this isn’t just chance.

That evening When I was all alone In our bedroom To give me company Your voice came along

It would be wrong to call them memories; they are moments of life, that man hat es erlebt- one has lived. They are inside me, part of me, branded into my skin, you might say - but they're not memories I want to live with, because there's no experience to be gained from them.

There is a charm to letters and cards that emails and smses can’t ever replicate, you cannot inhale them, drawing the fragrance of the place they have been mailed from, the feel of paper in your hand bearing the weight of the words contained within. You cannot rub your fingers over the paper and visualise the sender, seated at a table, writing, perhaps with a smile on their lips or a frown splitting the brow. You can’t see the pressure of the pen on the reverse of the page and imagine the mood the person might have been in when he or she was writing it. Smiley face icons cannot hope to replace words thought out carefully in order to put a smile on the other person’s face, the pressure of the pen, the sharpness or the laxity of the handwriting telling stories about the frame of mind of the writer, the smudges on the sheets of paper telling their own stories, blotches where tears might have fallen, hastily scratched out words where another would have been more appropriate, stories that the writer of the letter might not have intended to communicate. I have letters wrapped up in a soft muslin cloth, letters that are unsigned, tied up with a ribbon which I had once used to hold my soft, brown hair in place, and which had been gently untied by the writer of those letters. Occasionally, I unwrap them and breathe them in, knowing that the molecules from the hand that wrote them might still be scattered on the surface of the paper, a hand that is long dead.

I make a great memory

Time is not an enemy as such, but a missing person, sending cryptic postcards from the past.

Her moral obligation to keep our hearts entwined. Her preeminent love, smelling like life, in a good way, familiar like an ancient woodcut, a private postcard in the midst of a crowd, in an old T-shirt to soak up the memories, committed to recycling life. repairing the nucleus.

My mom passed away 3 years ago. Recently, I found her “special” photo album- the one in which she saved her favorite pictures, postcards and memories. Halfway through the album I found a small, wrinkled, slip of paper. When I looked closer, I could see that it was a “re-admittance” slip for me, to get back into school... in the 10th grade! Why would she save that all these years???

HMS Belfast is a gunship of 11,000 tons, commissioned in 1939, which saw active service in the Second World War. Since then it has been moored on the south bank of the Thames, in postcard-land, between Tower Bridge and London Bridge, opposite the Tower of London. From its deck one can see St. Paul’s Cathedral and the gilt top of the columnlike Monument to the Great Fire of London erected, as so much of London was erected, by Christopher Wren. The ship serves as a floating museum, as a memorial, as a training ground.

But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past - how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory. Paradise or the inferno, no one remembers anything much. Affairs and marriages ended long ago come to resemble postcards from the past. Brief note about the weather, a quick story, funny or sad, a bright picture on the other side. First to go, Roland thought as he walked towards her house, was the elusive self, precisely how you were yourself, how you appeared to others.

But no literature grows in isolation, and looking at the history of Indian writing in English is like looking at a silent movie made up of static postcards of Delhi, or Mumbai, or any other thronged Indian city: the life, the colour, the hubbub of hundreds of eager new writers and high-minded editors, peacocking poets and fiery-eyed pamphleteers, all of that has been bled out of collective memory. In the same year that Dean Mahomet wrote his Travels, the Madras Hircarrah (1794) started up, joining Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (1780) and the India Gazette (1781); the first in a flood of periodicals and journals that would breathlessly, urgently take the news of India running along from one province to another. The

She was the world's best cook. Every night, she used to sing "Funiculi" while she fixed supper- puttanesca sauce, homemade bread, pasta she made every Wednesday. Rosa had loved nothing better than working side by side with her in the bright scrubbed kitchen in the house on Prospect Street, turning out fresh pasta, baking a calzone on a winter afternoon, adding a pinch of basil or fennel to the sauce. Most of all, Rosa could picture, like an inedible snapshot in her mind, Mamma standing at the sink and looking out the window, a soft, slightly mysterious smile on her face. Herr "Mona Lisa smile," Pop used to call it. Rosa didn't know about that. She had seen a postcard of the Mona Lisa and thought Mamma was way prettier.

Dear Matt, In less than a day, I’ ll be standing on the same sand you stood on so many times before. Well, not the same sand, with the tides and winds and erosion and all of that, but the same symbolic sand. I’m so excited and scared that I can’ t sleep – even though I have to wake up in five hours! You know, I saved every one of your postcards. They’re here in a box under my bed – all the little stories you sent, like little pieces of California. Like the beach glass you guys always brought me. Sometimes I dump it out on my desk and press my ear to the pieces, trying to hear the ocean. Trying to hear you. But you don’ t say anything. Remember how you’ d come back from your vacation on the beach and tell me what it really felt like? What the ocean sounded like at dawn when the beach was deserted? What your hair and skin tasted like after swimming in saltwater all day? How the sand could burn your feet as you walked on it, but if you stuck your toes in, it was cold and wet underneath? How you spent three hours sitting on Ocean Beach just to watch the sun sink into the water a million miles away? If I closed my eyes as you were talking, it was like I was there, like your stories were my stories. In many ways, I feel as if I have memories of you there, too. Do you think that’s crazy? Matt, please don’ t think badly about Frankie’s contest. It’s just a silly game. It’s so Frankie, you know? No, I guess you wouldn’ t. You’ d kill her if you did! She just misses you. We all do. I’ ll look out for her, though. I promise. Please watch over us tomorrow, and for the next few weeks while we’re away. You’ ll be in my thoughts the whole time, like always. I’m going to find some red sea glass for you. I miss you more than you could ever know. Love, Anna

I can still feel the cold breath of air that brushed my brow as I entered the hallway, and I recall that the cast-iron balustrade on the stairs, the stucco garlands on the walls, the spot where the perambulator had been parked, and the largely unchanged names on the metal letter boxes, appeared to me like pictures in a rebus that I simply had to puzzle out correctly in order to cancel the monstrous events that had happened since we emigrated. It was as if it were now up to me alone, as if by some trifling mental exertion I could reverse the entire course of history, as if — if I desired it only — Grandmother Antonina, who had refused to go with us to England, would still be living in Kantstraße as before; she would not have gone on that journey, of which we had been informed by a Red Cross postcard shortly after the so-called outbreak of War, but would still be concerned about the wellbeing of her goldfish, which she washed under the kitchen tap every day and placed on the window ledge when the weather was fine, for a little fresh air. All that was required was a moment of concentration, piecing together the syllables of the word concealed in the riddle, and everything would again be as it once was.

The power of perfume is quite remarkable, the way it evokes memories of more pleasurable times. It’s a small thing that I can do to bring a moment of release for these courageous, but broken soldiers. I overheard one of the surgeons saying that our sense of smell is one of the last of our faculties to leave us when the end is near. So I shall endeavour to bring sweet, comforting fragrance to all in my care, together with soothing words of comfort in English, French and German if needs be, as I have seen first-hand the fear in all of the souls in my care. Death doesn’t distinguish, or indeed vilify, when the final moments are calling.

The picture we have for our lives, even down to a postcard holiday, doesn’t exist. Real memories worth keeping are made in the moment. They aren’t planned. We don’t thrive off idyllic. We thrive off real human emotion and experience. The here and now, and then our mind deciphers later which memories are our fondest.

My father's letters contained my whole bitch of a youth, which was dead and gone. I had no fond memories. It was all one stinking pile of horseshit, full of anxiety. Horrendous. And yet, it was my very own rotten childhood he sketched out in his army-censored postcards with their well-crafted, balanced sentences.

Her moral obligation to keep our hearts entwined. Her preeminent love, smelling like life, in a good way, familiar like an ancient woodcut, a private postcard in the midst of a crowd, in an old T-shirt to soak up the memories, committed to recycling life, repairing the nucleus.

A man who leaves his wife is also a kind of immigrant. He rejects the home he's always known for another. Is it a surprise that Americans have the highest divorce rate in the world? If ditched lovers are also counted, then our rate of betrayal becomes truly stratospheric. To start over and advance or save ourselves, if only in our minds, we're willing to destroy everything. Soaked in a depthless, sampling culture, we're also expert at forgetting. Not only do we have no historical memory, but our personal past can be willfully and instantly erased, with hardly a ripple in its wake, and there's no one around, no community, to remind us of our shames. Extreme narcissists, we cling to bizarre narratives that allow us to make the most preposterous statements without flinching, or indulge in the most perverse and damaging behaviors.

I carry within me, inscribed in the very cells of my body, the memory of an experience of danger so violent that sometimes I think I really lived it myself, or that I'll be forced to relive it one day.

The Three Fates When You Go Your bathmat dries Snow drifts from the sky filling empty shoe prints Memories are frayed lace Love singes in August Sugar hardens, Flour writhes with weevils The mail that arrives through the door slot - circulars, postcards, pleas for your support - piles up, unforwardable.

and from a thousand miles of soft memories and bad haikus away I let you pull me in, all warm and dry like a towel at the beach, which we lifted like that postcard From the Shade Garden— You are still everywhere, I wish you were here — Timmy Chong, from “I Know There’s Still a War Outside,” Up the Staircase Quarterly (no. 54, 2021)

Better to part with a beautiful memory than to push something that stood no chance. We can't lose the magic of a "could've been" story, the plot made for movies.

His routine had drawn him so deep inside himself that he feared the flood of memories her words on the postcard might unleash. He was afraid of wanting her again and all that it would mean. Finally, he read her postcard. He read it three times. He remembered how it had been.

Rummaging through these old, yellowing picture postcards, I find that everything has suddenly become confused, everything is in chaos. Ever since my father vanished from the story, from the novel, everything has come loose, fallen apart. His mighty figure, his authority, even his very name, were sufficient to hold the plot within fixed limits, the story that ferments like grapes in barrels, the story in which fruit slowly rots, trampled underfoot, crushed by the press of memories, weighted down by its own juices and by the sun. And now that the barrel has burst, the wine of the story has spilled out, the soul of the grape, and no divine skill can put it back inside the wineskin, compress it into a short tale, mold it into a glass of crystal. Oh, golden-pink liquid, oh, fairy tale, oh, alcoholic vapor, oh, fate! I don't want to curse God, I don't want to complain about life. So I'll gather together all those picture postcards in a heap, this era full of old-fashioned splendor and romanticism, I'll shuffle my cards, deal them as in a game of solitaire for readers who are fond of solitaire and intoxicating fragrances, of bright colors and vertigo.

The postcard came this morning. A postcard ... there's something touching about that, something from days gone by. The same days gone by to which you belong, where your roots lie, you might say.

Food is central to travelling and is a vivid entryway into another culture, but we do not have to literally leave home to “travel”. Movies, books, postcards, memories all take us, emotionally if not physically, to other places.

One of the most famous men in America constantly sends himself post-cards, and occasionally notes. He explained the card-sending as being his way of relieving his memory of unnecessary details. In his pocket he carries a few postals addressed to his office. I was with him one threatening day when he looked out the restaurant window, drew a card from his pocket and wrote on it. Then he threw it across the table to me with a grin. It was addressed to himself at his office, and said “Put your raincoat with your hat.” At the office he had other cards addressed to himself at home.