Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Memories Quotations

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

Let your memory be your travel bag.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Some are bound to die young. By dying young a person stays young in people's memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his brightness shines for all time.

Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print", it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.