Memorial Drive Quotes

“To survive trauma one must be able to tell a story about it.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“What matters is the transformative power of metaphor and the stories we tell ourselves about the arc and meaning of our lives.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Of course, we’re made up of what we’ve forgotten too, what we’ve tried to bury or suppress. Some forgetting is necessary and the mind works to shield us from things that are too painful; even so, some aspect of trauma lives on in the body, from which it can reemerge unexpectedly”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“In every family, at some point, there must be someone who feels like an outsider: the one always standing or sitting a little farther from the group in pictures; the older sibling when a new baby comes along; the child from a previous marriage, sometimes with a different last name. Suddenly, I was all of those.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“In Poetry as Survival, Gregory Orr asks the survivor’s questions about violence: How could I have been that close and not been destroyed by it? Why was I spared?—questions that can initiate in a writer the quest for meaning and purpose. “But this quest born out of trauma doesn’t simply lead the survivor forward,” he writes. “First it leads him or her backward, back to the scene of the trauma where the struggle must take place with the demon or angel who incarnates the mystery of violence and the mystery of rebirth and transformation.” He is referring to Lorca’s idea of duende: a demon that drives an artist, causing trouble or pain and an acute awareness of death. Of the demon’s effect on an artist’s work, Lorca wrote: “In trying to heal the wound that never heals lies the strangeness.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Memory knows before knowing remembers,” William Faulkner wrote.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“I have always loved the feel of books, the way they give a literal weight to words and make of them a sacred object.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“In the narrative of my life, which is the look backward rather than forward into the unknown and unstoried future, I emerged from the pool as from a baptismal font—changed, reborn—as if I had been shown what would be my calling even then. This is how the past fits into the narrative of our lives, gives meaning and purpose. Even my mother’s death is redeemed in the story of my calling, made meaningful rather than merely senseless. It is the story I tell myself to survive.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Mommy," you say quietly, so as not to be overheard. "Do you know how, when you love someone and you know they are hurting, it hurts you, too?”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“The way you got sideswiped was by going back. —JOAN DIDION”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Frost wrote, “is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. . .”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“For as long as I can remember, my father had been telling me that one day I would have to become a writer, that because of the nature of my experience I would have something necessary to say.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“For my father, the myth of Cassandra had been just another way he sought to guide me toward what he thought I needed to know. In some versions, Cassandra's fate is that she is merely misunderstood--not unlike what my father imagined to be the obvious fate of a mixed-race child born in a place like Mississippi. "She was a prophet," he told me, "but no one would believe her." Over the years, though, this second naming would come to weigh heavily on me. It was as if, in giving me that name, he had given me not only the burden of foresight but also the notion of causation--that whatever it was, if I could imagine it, see it in my mind's eye, it would happen because I had envisioned it. As if I had willed it into being.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Of course, we're made up of what we've forgotten too, what we've tried to bury or suppress.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“My whole life people have wondered "what" I am, what race or nationality. ... It's happened again and again: someone looking at me furtively, or calling me "exotic" and asking me "What's your heritage?" Once when I was making a purchase in a department store, the white salesman behind the counter was too nervous or too polite to ask--most likely not wanting to offend a white woman by assuming that she was anything but white. He needed to write on the back of my check the additional identifying information required back then: race and gender. Hesitating, his pen hovering, he tried to look at me without my notice. I watched his face as he deliberated after a second and third glance at my features, my straight, fine hair, my skin color and clothing. He must have considered, too, how I had spoken and whether any of those factors matched his notions of certain people--black people. I stood there and said nothing as he scribbled the letters WF, the designation for white female. In the same week, with a different clerk, I had been given the designation BF. That time I had not been alone: I had been standing in line at the grocery store with a friend who is black.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Si el trauma produce una fragmentación del yo, ¿qué significa entonces tener control sobre el yo? Puedes intentar olvidar. Puedes avanzar durante largo rato sin dar una vuelta completa, pero la memoria describe una trayectoria circula.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Geography is fate.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“But the photograph hints, too, at another story. I can see it in the tall grass brushing her ankles, the blades bent as if moved by wind.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“As the smoke rose from the car toward the skyline, I couldn’t help thinking that, at any moment, everything we had would be consumed by flames.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir