Memories Quotes

Yeah, you’re right about having entire rooms full of film and photos… in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage… I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides… I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that’s happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs,” Alecto responded. “People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines… The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I’ve been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

When everything else crumbles to dust, all we have left are the memories. I thought of Ophelia, wandering the theater, mind half gone...Never shall I cut from memory my sweet love's beauty.

~ Lisa Mantchev

No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.

~ Haruki Murakami

Some of the best memories are made in flip flops.

~ Kellie Elmore

Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Mom's everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didn't think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves.

~ Kyung-Sook Shin

My memories are like a shuffled deck of cards, each one coming up at random.

~ Brian James

Memories establish the past,Senses perceive the present,Imaginations shape the future.

~ Toba Beta

Memories shrink. Like a soap bar used over and over, they become deformed, weaker scented, too slight and slippery to hold.

~ Amanda Hodgkinson

A good fragrance is really a powerful cocktail of memories and emotion.

~ Jeffrey Stepakoff

My father spoke with his hands. He was deaf. His voice was in his hands. And his hands contained his memories.

~ Myron Uhlberg

We humans are different - our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them, our recollections in their retelling.

~ Mira Bartok

But memories got left behind while you kept walking on; every time you had to retrace your steps further to return to your memories, and sometimes it was better not to turn back at all.

~ Dalene Matthee

When he told it, I remembered. He handed me my past like… like a spear. But I do not know if I should take it. Is it still mine, if I do not want it?

~ Rick Riordan

Some memories are presents that I'm unable to unwrap over and over.

~ Brian James

It was no use to tell a person to forget. No matter how hard you tried to put it out of your mind, the hurt would still be there, festering under the forgetfulness, sending poison through your veins.

~ Mary Schumann

To see something marvellous with your own eyes - that’s wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you’ll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won’t ever really exist as a whole until you’re together, talking or thinking about that moment ... that’s worth more than one plus one. It’s worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can’t even imagine it.

~ Alastair Reynolds

My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important.

~ Mary E. Pearson

A thousand moments lost because you took them for granted, just because you expected a thousand more.

~ Saleem Sharma

What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?

~ S.j. Watson

You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.

~ John Banville

The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about. I myself can only wish that my stories were, indeed, nothing but incredible fabrications. I have stayed alive all these years clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion. I have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. But each time I tried to push them into the dark, they came back stronger and more vivid than ever. Like cancer cells, these memories have taken root in my mind and eaten into my flesh.

~ Haruki Murakami

I am starting to think that maybe memories are like this dessert. I eat it, and it becomes a part of me, whether I remember it later or not.

~ Erica Bauermeister

Memories fall like snowflakes upon my dreams. The snowflakes toss and tumble, each different and yet the same.

~ Lisa Schroeder

Memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.

~ Emil M. Cioran

She had realized there are only fragments, that 'memories' always consist of fragments the mind puts together into a pattern, adapts a picture staked out early without the need for a conenction with anything that really happened. A great deal is misunderstood by small children, then stored as images that attract similar images, confirming and reinforcing.

~ Marianne Fredriksson

For me, Mama's cabinet had been full of mysteries and secrets to be puzzled out, like an adventure. For them it had been full of memories. And I had broken all of them.

~ Stephanie Burgis

We don’t even survive in the memories of the living. Science has destroyed that myth. Whenever we remember something, what we’re doing is remembering the last time we remembered it; our memory doesn’t go back to the original notch, the first one was cut, but to the last one. Human memory is virtual, like that of a computer. When we open a file we’re not opening it as it was when we first created it, but as it was the last time we used it. It is called hypercathexis and is our brain’s most sophisticated recourse when it comes to confronting pain.

~ Enrique De Hériz

Her memories were beads jumbled loose in a box, unstrung.

~ Kate Maloy

In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.

~ W.g. Sebald

Ah God! to see the branches stir Across the moon at Grantchester! To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten Unforgettable, unforgotten River-smell, and hear the breeze Sobbing in the little trees. Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand Still guardians of that holy land? The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream, The yet unacademic streamIs dawn a secret shy and cold Anadyomene, silver-gold? And sunset still a golden sea From Haslingfield to Madingley? And after, ere the night is born,Do hares come out about the corn? Oh, is the water sweet and cool, Gentle and brown, above the pool? And laughs the immortal river still Under the mill, under the mill?Say, is there Beauty yet to find? And Certainty? and Quiet kind? Deep meadows yet, for to forget The lies, and truths, and pain?… oh! yet Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?

~ Rupert Brooke

We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.

~ Diane Ackerman

The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or inspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, if not back to your own neighborhood. To the street where you live. To things you left behind.And that's what you need, what you needed all along.

~ Jonathan Lethem

The feelings resembled memories, but memories of what? Apparently one can remember things that have never happened.

~ Leo Tolstoy

My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning's the same, the meter's identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it's right and you're wrong.

~ Elizabeth Mccracken

Looking back into childhood is like turning a telescope the wrong way around. Everything appears in miniature, but with a clarity it probably does not deserve; moreover it has become concentrated and stylized, taking shape in symbolism. Thus it is that I sometimes see my infant self as having been set down before a blank slate on which to construct a map or schema of the external world, and as hesitantly beginning to sketch it, with many false starts and much rubbing-out, the anatomy of my universe. Happiness and sorrow, love and friendship, hostility, a sense of guilt and more abstract concepts still, must all find a place somewhere, much as an architect lays out the plan of a house he is designing - hall, dining-room and bedrooms - but must not forget the bathroom. In a child’s map, too, some of the rooms are connected by a serving-hatch, while others are sealed off behind baize doors. How can the fragments possibly be combined to make sense? Yet this map or finished diagram, constructed in the course of ten or twelve years’ puzzling, refuses to be ignored, and for some time to come will make itself felt as bones through flesh, to emerge as the complex organism which adults think of as their philosophy of life. Presumably it has its origins in both heredity and enviorment. So with heredity I shall begin.

~ Frances Partridge

Well, memory can play tricks. Most people, I think, tend to remember the good rather than the bad when someone close to them dies.

~ Soheir Khashoggi

Those are exactly the kind of memories I try to avoid, but they're like abestos: invisible and deadly. You need special gear to get rid of them.

~ Kristin Hannah

Yes. I rememb

~ Meljean Brook

When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory

~ Marcel Proust

Sometimes moments in life are so perfect you want to freeze frame them, capture them within your soul forever so they never fade away—they burn themselves into your being until they’re a part of who you are.

~ Cassandra Giovanni