Memories Quotes

To invest into a memory that will only take you down a road that cannot be traveled is futile and counter-productive. It takes us away from the here and now, and it only impedes our well-being when we give nostalgic cadence to this venture.

~ Dc Gunnersen

There's not a day that goes by, without me thinking of you, dying, in someone else's arms.

~ Anthony Liccione

Sweet as the past may be, it best remains pressed between the pages of memory, savoured for a moment or two on quiet Sunday afternoons.

~ Indu Muralidharan

We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. That first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two spent cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing.

~ John Banville

Ephraim lifted the top of the trunk. Neatly stacked were mementoes from what seemed like hundreds of journeys. Right on top was an etching of the Eiffel tower next to an African mask that looked at him with surprised eyes. He reached in a little deeper and unearthed a small teapot decorated with blue drawings just like the kind his grandmother collected and kept in a locked china cabinet.

~ Megan Frazer Blakemore

They were all gone now, broken or taken by people who had no idea what such items represented. Let them go. She held the past in her heart, with no need of physical items to tie it down.

~ Robin Hobb

A past will never die. It's always there and always present as long as your living breathing and able to remember.

~ Stephen Lozada

I was afraid to fall asleep, but staying awake also brought back painful memories. Memories I sometimes wish I could wash away, even though I am aware that they are an important part of what my life is; who I am now. I stayed up all night, anxiously waiting for daylight, so that I could fully return to my new life, to rediscover happiness I had known as a child, the joy that had stayed alive inside me even through times when being alive itself became a burden. These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past.

~ Ishmael Beah

You can hide memories, suppress them, but you can’t erase the history that produced them

~ Haruki Murakami

Bad memories were hard enough, but it was torture to be haunted by the good.

~ Shelley Noble

It is not our memories but the person we have become because of those experiences that we should treasure. This is the lesson these keepsakes teach us when we sort them. The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.

~ Marie Kondō

Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere.

~ Carla H. Krueger

Nearly two years of dates. Still no question. Her mother and father want to set a proper date. Still no question. Her friends keep asking, when, Natasha? When? But she still hasn’t been asked The Question. It’s enjoyable to be the one with all the secrets, but in her honest mind – the hidden part that’s always sleeping – the secrets he keeps about when and if give her a feeling inside she’s never really understood completely – a sensation she had as a child when she got to the end of a fairytale where never-ending love and happiness were all but expected and wondered whether there might be…. one last page.

~ Carla H. Krueger

He remembers how someone – he forgets who – once said in a sarcastic tone, “Isn’t she just Little Miss Sweetness and Light?” – and it was a statement that put him off proposing. It made him seriously reassess his options. He didn’t want to be with someone others saw as overly-moral because he has flaws, he has weaknesses. How would his mistakes compare to her virtuousness? She used to dislike the competitiveness at work, the way she claimed she could never really make friends with anyone because everything was always so fake and cut-throat and he used to berate her for it, used to tell her to accept it, to realise the truth about life and relationships – but she wouldn’t take it. She was always thinking too hard about everything, always questioning her motives. Surely, if he’d married her, she’d have started questioning his.

~ Carla H. Krueger

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

~ Carla H. Krueger

Yes, memories do haunt. Memories of a happy past, in the expectation of a bleak future, in a sad present. - Anita

~ Nilesh Sakpal

I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all.

~ Margaret Atwood

The past only has power over you when it's forgotten... ignored or repressed.

~ Mark Kendrick

It's painful when the phantom of the past keeps on lingering you even you wanted to move on.

~ Kenneth C. Agudo

One minute you are here and the next moment you are some place else, some time a long ago. That is the thing about your mind. Memories. Everything still exists in the folds of your brain; you may try to forget or honestly believe that you have forgotten but nothing is ever erased. Every memory is registered, good or bad does not matter. Sometimes you bring some out on purpose, sometimes some memory jumps at you on its own, shocking you, shaking you, making you realize how far you have come and at the same time proving to you that you can never really go far enough.

~ Arti Honrao

It is possible to construct a history which is logically consistent. It cannot be said to be true; simply that it can be sustained without contradiction. Under a given set of experimental conditions, a finite number of possible histories can be recreated using Griffiths’s method; these are called Griffiths’s Consistent Histories. In these, the world behaves as though composed of separate objects, each having fixed, intrinsic properties. However, the number of consistent histories that can be created from a single set of data is generally greater than one. As a being you are self-aware, and this consciousness allows you to hypothesize that the story you’ve created from a given set of memories is a consistent history, justified by a single narrative voice. As a unique individual, having existed for a particular period and been subjected to an ontology of objects and properties, you can assert this with absolute certainty, and so automatically assume that it is a Griffiths’s history. You make this hypothesis about real life, rather than about the domain of dreams.

~ Michel Houellebecq

The past is only the present become invisible and mute, its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious.

~ Mary Webb

For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past/.../, wherein nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

The past, rich with it's pains and joys, shuffles before me, relieving the weary dullness of endless days. I rejoice; I agonize.

~ Rukhsana Ahmad

The past is a tricky thing. Sometimes it's etched in stone. And other times, it's rendered in soft memories. But if you meddle too long in deep, dark things... Who knows what monsters you'll awaken?

~ Emily Thorne

Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.

~ J.m. Coetzee

One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.

~ Iris Murdoch

Time laughs in the distance as I cling to the belief memories of you will fade.

~ Raine Cooper

The past is no good if you can't learn from it; therefore, no sense in dwelling on it.

~ Arians Karlovičs

Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.

~ Gaston Bachelard

Your brain activates a magnificent system to store memories as reference points for you to learn from... not to create a past for you to be stuck in.

~ Steve Maraboli

Never would I have a more memorable time than the month I spent in the mountains, though I wonder, when I say this, if it appears so only because it is our nature to make a heaven out of places to which we can never return.

~ Yiyun Li

It's a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past, should exist only in memories glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photography forces us to see people before their future weighed down on them. Before they knew their endings.

~ Kate Morton

I didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much: a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were, they had all my memories.

~ Raymond Chandler

Night is when the whispers of the past become the echoes of the present.

~ Faraaz Kazi

Yesterday I smiled, tomorrow never came and today is what I'm living.

~ Jill Telford

You can never go back to a specific moment. That's why it's important to live in the present and not the past. Don't let foolish memories get in the way of the makings of new ones.

~ Emily Coussons

It could be yesterdaywhen I was less in loveI thinkFor I didn’t see you in the mirrorbehind mewhile getting dressed.The way your hands couldn’t stay awayand our bodies always found their ways back to each otheras if they were meant to be togetherClose.But then it was today and I saw you againin the mirrorbehind me while getting dressedSo I go to sleep tonightalonewithout actually falling asleep because I’m scared of the moment I will wake upand realise it was just a dreamYou’re actually gone.Now all I can do is get through to another tomorrowhoping that I will be less in loveagainLike yesterdayBut not today.I was never really well with things at all.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Wilhelm’s smile reminded Harry of his father’s sad, resigned smile, the smile of a man looking backwards because that’s where the things that made him smile were.

~ Jo Nesbø

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

~ Penelope Lively