Memory Quotes

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.

~ George William Curtis

My memory of my household is of one immersed in books and music. I have a very intimate relationship with Bengali literature, particularly Tagore, and my interest besides reading then was music.

~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of a Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a MaCaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.

~ Ethel Barrymore

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.

~ Carol Ann Duffy

If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry... thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.

~ Philip Sidney

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'

~ James Fenton

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

~ Philip Levine

The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.

~ Laura Riding

The fact is, when men carry the same ideals in their hearts, nothing can isolate them - neither prison walls nor the sod of cemeteries. For a single memory, a single spirit, a single idea, a single conscience, a single dignity will sustain them all.

~ Fidel Castro

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.

~ Primo Levi

Home is one's birthplace, ratified by memory.

~ Henry Anatole Grunwald

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

~ Joseph Conrad

No memory is ever alone; it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.

~ Louis L'amour

When the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among the white men shall have become a myth, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless.

~ Chief Seattle

During the first couple of years at school... I used to take my lunch and go down by the old fair grounds & sit alone by the side of the road & eat it... Those lovely, lonely lunches stick deep in my memory as unhappy times.

~ Frederick Banting

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

~ Elie Wiesel

When I read a book I liked, I would get a pen and one of my father's legal pads and rewrite it from memory as if I had thought of it myself. It was a clear sign that I wanted to be involved in writing, even if it was just pretend at that point.

~ Jonathan Dee

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

My dad took me for an audition once, to show me, 'OK, you want to be a child actor, this is what it's like.' I sang a folk song about donkeys on this West End stage with this big director, and there was a queue of 200 girls all singing 'Memory.' I was terrible. Terrible.

~ Emilia Clarke

The human brain had a vast memory storage. It made us curious and very creative. Those were the characteristics that gave us an advantage - curiosity, creativity and memory. And that brain did something very special. It invented an idea called 'the future.'

~ David Suzuki