Memory Quotes

It is important to leave behind a rich and memorable legacy than just accumulated history!

~ Sanjai Velayudhan

He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he'd landed and made his life, was not his

~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Even if we have bad feelings about our past and it causes a sense of alienation, it belongs to our history. Its benchmarks are stored in the granary of our mind and crucial evaluations for the future cannot be made without consulting the archive of our memory. ( “Not without the past”)

~ Erik Pevernagie

When we are “time traveling”, we may trip over problems from the past which distort our memory. If we are weary of dealing with lost causes or lame ducks in our history, we have to make up our mind and give up destructive thinking patterns. At that juncture, time has come to go back to the future. ( “A glimpse of the future )

~ Erik Pevernagie

So the next time you doubt the strangeness of the future, remember how you were born in a hunter-gatherer tribe ten thousand years ago, when no one knew of Science at all. Remember how you were shocked, to the depths of your being, when Science explained the great and terrible sacred mysteries that you once revered so highly. Remember how you once believed that you could fly by eating the right mushrooms, and then you accepted with disappointment that you would never fly, and then you flew. Remember how you had always thought that slavery was right and proper, and then you changed your mind. Don't imagine how you could have predicted the change, for that is amnesia. Remember that, in fact, you did not guess. Remember how, century after century, the world changed in ways you did not guess.Maybe then you will be less shocked by what happens next.

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

History is the enemy of memory.

~ Richard White

It’s not that I can’t remember. It’s that I prefer not to remember, which means that I prefer not to remember what not remembering did to me the last time I did it.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn't this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn't it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written?

~ Orhan Pamuk

And though, indeed, it only happened once, it’s gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s a memory for them to happen in …

~ Graham Swift

Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny, the way monogamy is funny, the waysomeone falling down in the street is funny.I entered a revolving door and emergedas a human being. When you think of meis my face electronically blurred?

~ Jeffrey Mcdaniel

I Came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary individuals, pridigies from the long tail of humanity's bell curve, or was there something we could all learn from their talents?

~ Joshua Foer

We humans are like squirrels who spend all summer gathering and hoarding nuts and when winter comes can't remember where they are.

~ Marty Rubin

Life is a flower in the garden of humanity. It blooms for a short time and then slowly it disappears and becomes a memory on the canvas of infinite time.

~ Debasish Mridha

I don’t want to be remembered for my work. I want to be remembered for my love.

~ Kamand Kojouri

...landscape is a work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.

~ Simon Schma

For every inch of skin, there is memory. Devils are so made. Saints, too, if you believe in them. His humanity has been broken as an old walking stick that once held up a crippled man named Thomas. He realizes the stick and the man are one thing and he can fall. He has violated the laws beneath the laws of men and countries, something deeper, the earth and the sea, the explosions of trees. He has to care again. He has to be water again, rock, earth with its new spring wildflowers and its beautiful, complex mosses.

~ Linda Hogan

Every memory is precious. It is more precious when it is a memory of a baby’s smile.

~ Debasish Mridha

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

~ Margaret Atwood

I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

~ Janet Fitch

My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance--this is why people tell me secrets--my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is ever lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound.

~ Dave Eggers

The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.

~ Roberto Bolaño

After everything is said and done, a memory remains a treacherous thing…How long does one cling on to the people they’ve lost? How long could I have remembered my grandfather? How long had it been since I forgotten him and my mind began harbouring other things?

~ Kanza Javed

Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

~ Rohinton Mistry

You always know more than you think you know without being aware of it. You always remember best what has hurt most.Memory is a reflex of the pain. Knowledge is the memory of the pain combined with the unconsciousness which we 'rationalize' via dreams or by means of reading literature. It is impossible to learn from someone else's experience unless we don't assume this experience as our own's, which we can achieve only by living it anew and from scratch. We can not live our lives at someone else's expense. Only life fraught with dangers and risks and lived as your own's deserves its name. Only selfish people do not live their lives as if they do not belong entirely to them. Cowardice equals a life that you refuse to live at its fullest and at its most dangerous.

~ Martin Walser

But the memories that hang heaviest are the easiest to recall.

~ Julie Gregory

He won't remember any of this, he's too young and it's too painful. Children are wonderfully self-preserving. They filter memory, cleanse and sanitise it, unless it's too awful to renounce. And this isn't. Or is it? These gummy spots of time that inextricably adhere when so much more is erased, how do we account for their tenacity?

~ Rick Gekoski

That's the problem with memories: you can visit them but you can't live with them.

~ Shaun David Hutchinson

If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases hurting stays in the memory.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

We all remember people the way we want to remember them.

~ Cassia Leo

This empty shell holds nothing but the echoes of what was.

~ Jenim Dibie

Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back.

~ Robin Hobb

People seemed to have two different selves—an experiencing self who endures every moment equally and a remembering self who gives almost all the weight of judgment afterward to two single points in time, the worst moment and the last one. The remembering self seems to stick to the Peak-End rule even when the ending is an anomaly. Just a few minutes without pain at the end of their medical procedure dramatically reduced patients’ overall pain ratings even after they’d experienced more than half an hour of high level of pain. “That wasn’t so terrible,” they’d reported afterward. A bad ending skewed the pain scores upward just as dramatically.

~ Atul Gawande

Three grey women walk with me Fate and Grief and Memory. My fate brought grief; my grief must be With me through Eternity, Such thy power, memory.Three grey women walk with me.

~ Adelaide Crapsey

Sadness is a bruise on the skin of memory.

~ John Mark Green

I can write about it if I am careful, if I keep it far enough away.

~ Kij Johnson

If there is anything certain in life, it is this. Time doesn't always heal. Not really. I know they say it does, but that is not true. What time does is to trick you into believing that you have healed, that the hurt of a great loss has lessened. But a single word, a note of a song, a fragrance, a knife point of dawn light across an empty room, any one of these things will take you back to that one moment you have never truly forgotten. These small things are the agents of memory. They are the sharp needle points piercing the living fabric of your life.Life, my children, isn't linear where the heart is concerned. It is filled with invisible threads that reach out from your past and into your future. These threads connect every second we have lived and breathed. As your own lives move forward and as the decades pass, the more of these threads are cast. Your task is to weave them into a tapestry, one that tells the story of the time we shared.

~ Stephen Lee

She had thought about that moment so often during the past few years it had dried out. It was stale, like old, odourless potpourri. But she still want back to it, because it was the only one.

~ Cassandra Rose Clarke

My youth is like a scab: under it there is a wound that every day leaks blood. It disfigures me.

~ Gottfried Benn

When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light.

~ Ian Mcewan

The SleepingI have imagined all this:In 1940 my parents were in loveAnd living in the loft on West 10thAbove Mark Rothko who painted cabbage rosesOn their bedroom walls the night they got married.I can guess why he did it.My mother’s hair was the color of yellow applesAnd she wore a velvet hat with her pajamas.I was not born yet. I was remote as starlight.It is hard for me to imagine thatMy parents made love in a roomful of rosesAnd I wasn’t there.But now I am. My mother is blushing.This is the wonderful thing about art.It can bring back the dead. It can wake the sleepingAs it might have late that nightWhen my father and mother made love above RothkoWho lay in the dark thinking Roses, Roses, Roses.

~ Lynn Emanuel