Life Quotes

This is the story I am working on. But it isn't complete as I don't have the right way to begin. I sit on the crosshouse floor and look at the objects. I see different ways they could be put together and the way the story changes over time. The objects fall into their groupings and they talk to each other in different fashions depending on where they're put and at first it makes me panic. I put the memories together again and again in their different patterns and try to understand which is the correct way. Then at last I see that there isn't one. I see that if I am lucky and do it right, the story will not ever come together in one final meaning. Because there is not yet any end.

~ Anna Smaill

There's no way to really preserve a person when they've gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth; it's just a story. Stories are all we're ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.

~ Steven Hall

It’s what we’re all trying to do, right? Remember a time that was better. Re-create a moment of that memory as we let the crisp Coke bubble down our throats. Riding bikes on a summer day. Sitting on the curb and watching the streetlights come on. Playing in the sprinklers with a group of neighbor kids. We’re all trying to salvage a time when we dreamed beyond our reality and thought monsters were under our beds instead of peppering our family trees. We’re trying to harness those fleeting moments that turned our ordinary lives into something extraordinary. In the sepia haze of those memories, we are beautiful.

~ Liza Palmer

Happiness is in love, in service, and in beautiful memory.

~ Debasish Mridha

Life is a journey, education is our pleasure and our memory.

~ Debasish Mridha

The magic of love is that it becomes our memory which we never can forget.

~ Debasish Mridha

Don't let the day go by without a handful of fun, for only those we'll be memorable and even intensified through time

~ A.m.m Alusi

I have forgotten more of my life than I remember, and with my forgetting I have lost my being.

~ Russell Hoban

Nature never remembers, that’s why she’s beautiful.

~ Alberto Caeiro

We lose track of everything, and of everyone, even ourselves. The facts of my father's life are less known to me than those of the life of Hadrian. My own existence, if I had to write of it, would be reconstructed by me from externals, laboriously, as if it were the life of someone else: I should have to turn to letters, and to the recollections of others, in order to clarify such uncertain memories. What is ever left but crumbled walls, or masses of shade?

~ Marguerite Yourcenar

Though you forget the way to the Temple,There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not. You shall not deny the Stranger.

~ T.s. Eliot

...no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.

~ Catherine Lacey

Here's what I think: when you're born, you're assigned a brain like you're assigned a desk, a nice desk, with plenty of pigeonholes and drawers and secret compartments. At the start, it's empty, and then you spend your life filling it up. You're the only one who understands the filing system, you amass some clutter, sure, but somehow it works: you're asked the capital of Oregon, and you say Salem; you want to remember your first-grade teacher's name, and there it is, Miss Fox. Then suddenly you're old, and though everything's still in your brain, it's crammed so tight that when you try to remember the name of the guy who does the upkeep on your lawn, your first childhood crush comes fluttering out, or the persistent smell of tomato soup in a certain Des Moines neighborhood.

~ Elizabeth Mccracken

I wanted a life of adventure. I wanted to travel. I wanted to work my way up to being Somebody. I wanted to leave a mark on the Earth and be remembered.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.

~ Carl Sagan

Wish for the best, prepare for the worst

~ Ary Hidayat

Unassuming in manner, genial and kindly in his intercourse with his fellow-men, never showing impatience or irritation, devoid of personal ambition of the baser sort or of the slightest desire to exalt himself... In the minds of those who knew him, the greatness of his intellectual achievements will never overshadow the beauty and dignity of his life.[H.A. Burnstead's comments on the life of esteemed scientist J. Willard Gibbs]

~ Henry Andrews Bumstead

Maybe you are a memory who is supposed to live forever.

~ Saleem Sharma

The first and last weakness of his life, before him again. For a moment he felt himself blinded by his own memories; his own remembrances of the wits and wiles of Marian Halcombe that would steal into his thoughts; the sound of her laughter at his outrageous tales, the shadowed glance of distrust, the way her eyebrows would raise ever so slightly despite her resolution to seem disinterested in his foreign insights. She was the first woman he ventured to have complete equality in matching his tremendous cleverness.

~ Wilkie Collins

People's lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and... well, sometimes they can't talk about them.

~ Alan Moore

A full moon, although less splendid than that earlier on,lit everything around. Before I reached the point where I would have to leave the road and set off across country, the narrow path I was following seemed suddenly to end and disappear behind a large hedge, and there before me, as if blocking my way, stood a single, tall tree, very dark at first against the transparently clear night sky. Out of nowhere, a breeze got up. It set the tender stems of the grasses shivering, made the green blades of the reeds shudder and sent a ripple across the brown waters of a puddle. Like a wave, it lifted up the spreading branches of the tree and, murmuring, climbed the trunk, and then, suddenly, the leaves turned their undersides to the moon and the whole beech tree (because it was a beech) was covered in white as far as the topmost branch.It was only a moment, no more than that, but the memory of it will last as long as my life lasts.

~ José Saramago

Kid, if you never remember your dreams you lose out on half of your life

~ Carla Speed Mcneil

Life demands more thinking than remembering.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.

~ Helen Keller

For now I sit on my final island of the present as my radius of memory shrinks; lost already are the islands of work, of old friendships...Other islands fade as I brood upon them.

~ Chuma Nwokolo

Some things are not supposed to be forgotten, these are the things which make us human.

~ Nenia Campbell

If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - than my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.

~ Virginia Woolf

Once fallen in true love, a person can't really fall out of it, no matter what. How much ever you try to hate your better half, you'll end up falling more instead. Some part of him will always reside in your heart.

~ Mehek Bassi

Love happens only once, what happens after that is just compromise; with your heart and with your life...

~ Mehek Bassi

There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.

~ Arundhati Roy

In the sea of my emotions, his presence is like a pearl in the oyster. Very hard to locate, yet very precious and still beautiful.

~ Mehek Bassi

Whenever it rains, I remember him, not as a tear that hails down as a raindrop, but as a God of fertility. As, every time I remember him, his memories conceive a baby of emotions in me!

~ Mehek Bassi

So if existence was just binary, dead or alive, here or not here, what would be the fucking point in anything? My mom used to say that's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory--hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.

~ Isaac Marion

Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.

~ Julian Barnes

Only a sentimental being would care about such everyday things—things used and discarded by the humans of their respective eras without thought, yet kept and preserved by an immortal who never forgot them. An immortal who loved and cared for them, dusting them off for an eternity, keeping their dead spirits as alive as he—stuck in their immortal tomb never to find the rest everything must eventually seek. Time had no meaning in this cavern of infinite age.

~ Michelle M. Pillow

I don't want to be a memory, I want to be a thought

~ Josue Rivera

So these things happen, deep in our lives. We do not speak of them. We hide them even from ourselves, but they do not leave us.

~ David Malouf

The colors of living things begin to fade with the last breath, and the soft, springy skin and supple muscle rot within weeks. But the bones sometimes remain, faithful echoes of the shape, to bear some last faint witness to the glory of what was.

~ Diana Gabaldon

...I want to live doubly - first with you and then afterwards in memory ...

~ John Geddes

That's what memory is like: layers, one overlapping another, and compacting down the way old leaves slowly crumble and turn to a rich peaty soil, nourishing the new things that will grow. It's why it's important, remembering things. It's why it matters, when the memories aren't there, and no one fills in the gaps for you.

~ Julia Green