Memory Quotes

We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss.

~ Cassandra Clare

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?

~ George Eliot

I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.

~ Raymond Carver

Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn't give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. The scenery was the last thing on my mind.

~ Haruki Murakami

And I'll dance with you in Vienna,I'll be wearing a river's disguise.The hyacinth wild on my shouldermy mouth on the dew of your thighs.And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,with the photographs there and the moss.And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,my cheap violin and my cross.

~ Leonard Cohen

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

~ Michael Ondaatje

You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.

~ Amy Carmichael

If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?

~ Jodi Picoult

Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.

~ Ann Druyan

You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire. interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).

~ Roland Barthes

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

Hindi mo pwedeng mahalin ang isang tao nang hindi mo minamahal ang hilaga, silangan, timog at kanluran ng kanyang paniniwala. Kapag nagmahal ka’y dapat mong tanggapin bawat letra ng kanyang birth certificate. Kasama na doon ang kanyang libag, utot at bad breath. Pero me limit. Pantay-pantay ang ibinibigay na karapatan sa lahat ng tao upang lumigaya, o masaktan, o magpakagago, pero kapag sumara na ang mga pinto, nawasak na ang mga puso, nawala na ang mga kaluluwa at ang bilang ay umabot na sa zero, goodbye na. Pero, the memory of that one great but broken love will still sustain you, tama nga na mas matindi ang mga alaala.

~ Ricky Lee

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

~ Antonio Porchia

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.

~ Julian Barnes

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

~ Haruki Murakami

You know what I think? she says. That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction--they're all just fuel.

~ Haruki Murakami

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.You forget some things, dont you?Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

~ David Eagleman

...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.

~ Jane Austen

Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.

~ Marilynne Robinson

I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.

~ Stephen King

But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

If only you would realize some day, how much have you hurt me,If only your heart ever, craves for me or my presence…If only you feel that love again someday for me,If only you are affected someday by my absence…Only you can end all my suffering and this unbearable pain,If only you would know what you could never procure…If only you go through the memories of past once again,Since the day you left my heart has bled, no one has its cure…If only you would bring that love, those showers and that rain…If only you would come back and see what damage you create,I’ve been waiting for your return since forever more…If only you would see the woman that you have made,You said we cannot sail through, how were you so sure?If only you can feel the old things that can never fade,You may have moved on, but a piece of my heart is still with you…I know how I’ve come so far alone; I know how I’m able to wade,People say that I’m insane and you won’t ever come back again…Maybe you would have never made your separate way,Maybe you would have stayed with me and proved everyone wrong…If only you would know the pain of dying every day,If only you would feel the burden of smiling and being strong…

~ Mehek Bassi

CLEMENTINE: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon.JOEL: I know.CLEMENTINE: What do we do?JOEL: Enjoy it.

~ Charlie Kaufman

Scars are just another kind of memory.

~ M.l. Stedman

Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.

~ Steven Wright

People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn't.

~ Christopher Paolini

A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.

~ Mark Twain

Few things are more deceptive than memories.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

~ George Steiner

Whatever I learned,Whatever I knew,Seems like those faded years of childhood that flew,Away in some dilemma,Always in some confusion,The purpose of this life,Seems like an illusion!

~ Mehek Bassi

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.

~ Julian Barnes

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

~ Julian Barnes

Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?

~ John Steinbeck

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

~ Mark Twain

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

~ Harold Pinter

The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.

~ Seneca

If you never tell anyone the truth about yourself, eventually you start to forget. The love, the heartbreak, the joy, the despair, the things I did that were good, the things I did that were shameful--if I kept them all inside, my memories of them would start to disappear. And then I would disappear.

~ Cassandra Clare

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.

~ George Orwell

I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try and call on it, just like a light bulb cracking off when you throw the switch.

~ Lucy Grealy