"Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream"
About this Quote
Waits turns memory into machinery: a train you can watch recede, loud and physical, yet powerless to stop. It’s a perfect image for how the past behaves in real life. You don’t lose it in a clean break; you watch it leave in slow motion, shrinking while the sound still hangs in the air. The line refuses nostalgia’s usual softness. This isn’t a scrapbook. It’s departure.
The craft is in the pivot: “the things you can’t remember / tell the things you can’t forget.” Waits flips memory into negative space. Forgetting isn’t emptiness; it’s evidence. What’s missing outlines what remains, like a body-shaped shadow on a wall. The subtext is psychological but not clinical: trauma, addiction, old love, regret - the mind edits, but the edits are revealing. You can’t narrate your own life cleanly because the cuts in the reel are part of the story.
Then he widens the frame to history, and that’s where the cynicism creeps in. “History puts a saint in every dream” skewers the way we launder the past while we sleep. Dreams, like national myths, cast us as better than we were; they hand out halos to make the pain feel purposeful. In Waits’ universe, sanctification is a coping mechanism, not a moral fact. The context is his broader songwriting project: giving American memory its bruises back, insisting that the romance of the road and the glow of legend are always trailed by what got left behind on the platform.
The craft is in the pivot: “the things you can’t remember / tell the things you can’t forget.” Waits flips memory into negative space. Forgetting isn’t emptiness; it’s evidence. What’s missing outlines what remains, like a body-shaped shadow on a wall. The subtext is psychological but not clinical: trauma, addiction, old love, regret - the mind edits, but the edits are revealing. You can’t narrate your own life cleanly because the cuts in the reel are part of the story.
Then he widens the frame to history, and that’s where the cynicism creeps in. “History puts a saint in every dream” skewers the way we launder the past while we sleep. Dreams, like national myths, cast us as better than we were; they hand out halos to make the pain feel purposeful. In Waits’ universe, sanctification is a coping mechanism, not a moral fact. The context is his broader songwriting project: giving American memory its bruises back, insisting that the romance of the road and the glow of legend are always trailed by what got left behind on the platform.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
|---|
More Quotes by Tom
Add to List
