Memory Quotes

Inside the museums, | Infinity goes up on trial | Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while

~ Bob Dylan

Faith keeps our ships moving, while empathy and the memories of our experiences guide us to wisdom.

~ Suzy Kassem

Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Are our thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by massive posters with repeating images? Catching a fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.

~ Patti Smith

The young man only looks to the future because he has lived little, the old man looks to the past because he has little left to live.

~ Fennel Hudson

Could there be anything more sad and more lonely than remembering what terrible things the future will bring?

~ Stefan Merrill Block

Time becomes meaningless without memory and we humans have a unique consciousness that allows us to live in the past or the future, which is actually more of a curse than a useful superpower.

~ Jon Edgell

In fact the flexibility of our memories makes it relatively easy because we can meld all these different memories together seamlessly to invent a new imaginary scene, one which we have never even contemplated before, let alone witnessed. The flexibility of memory seems to be the key to imagining a future. Our millions of fragments of memories from different times of our lives are not set in stone; they can change, giving us endless, instant imaginative possibilities.

~ Claudia Hammond

Only memories have a future.

~ Ljupka Cvetanova

I do not want to recollect. I should be afraid of preventing the future and of allowing the past to encroach on me. It is out of the utter forgetfulness of yesterday that I create every new hour's freshness. It is never enough for me to have been happy. I do not believe in dead things and cannot distinguish between being no more and never having been.

~ André Gide

Photography is never real, it’s merely one of many ways of telling the truth.

~ John Thai

History is the diary of humankind, to forget it is to try to navigate the future with no memory of the past.

~ T.l. Rese

He was a prisoner to the calendar, he realised, as we all were. He thought in little boxes that were to be ticked off and filled with things to do. Almost every day he thought back to what he had been doing ten years ago, twenty years ago, further. He lived in the past, by his diary. He was a history man, his head full of dead leaves. It was a form of reassurance, he knew. There were too many roads into the future and he didn't like not having a map for it.(Wait)

~ Conrad Williams

That's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory— hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can built off our pasts and make future.

~ Isaac Marion

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

~ William Faulkner

Beyond the late Fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then.

~ George Orwell

Every man's memory is his private literature.

~ Aldous Huxley

I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.

~ Rabih Alameddine

You will die but the words you speak or spoke, will live forever.

~ Auliq Ice

The desire for glory is no different from that instinct for preservation that is common to all creatures. It is as if we enhance our being if we can gain a place in the memory of others; it is a new life that we acquire, which becomes as precious to us as the one we received from Heaven.

~ Montesquieu

When all is lost, there is still a memory.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

I fly through memory to find a newborn love.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Your words crossed a threshold,And entered the past,Yet they have created,A word that will last.

~ Somya Kedia

I want to remember what we were like before we became ourselves.

~ Kris Kidd

Consciousness returns to its own dark thoughts and bad memories as reliably as kids to their own scabs, and maybe it's not so difficult to understand why. The mind doesn't like unresolved issues. Except that moods don't get resolved, they get forgotten – but just try forgetting the free-fall through depression's vacuum in a hurry. Worse than that, depression isn't just a memory, it's a state of mind. If you remember it, you're in it.

~ Mark Crutchfield

…Look, I’m real sorry about Cheryl, I know you loved her a lot,” Mandy apologized gloomily. “It’s wrong that people have to keep killing off Pollution.”“It’s alright, I think she wants to be remediated,” Alecto told her calmly, though his grief-stricken and depressed expression said more to Mandy than his words did. “You don’t have to forget Cheryl, no matter what Mearth said to you,” Mandy pointed out. “People shouldn’t be forced to forget what they love, or to just get over the death of what they love. Cheryl was your friend and nobody can make you forget her if you don’t want to.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost.

~ Claire North

Time is ungovernable, but grief presents us with a choice: what do we do with the savage energies of bereavement? What do we do with the memory - or in the memory - of the beloved? Some commemorate love with statuary, but behavior, too, is a memorial, as is a well-lived life. In death, there is always the promise of hope. The key is opening, rather than numbing, ourselves to pain. Above all, we must show our children how to celebrate existence in all its beauty, and how to get up after life has knocked us down, time and again. Half-dead, we stand. And together, we salute love. Because in the end, that's all that matters. How hard we loved, and how hard we tried.

~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

It kind of scares me though, to keep wearing it every day like I do. What happens when I run out of it? Will I forget what she looked like? What it looked like when the sun reflected on her hair? The way her pillow always smelled like her? Will my memory of her run out too?

~ Keary Taylor

At the bar on the Favoritenstrasse, Julius the policeman talked to us about dignity, evolution, the great Darwin and the great Nietzsche. I translated so that my good friend Ulises could understand what he was saying, although I didn’t understand any of it. The prayer of the bones, said Julius. The yearning for health. The virtue of danger. The tenacity of the forgotten. Bravo, said my good friend Ulises. Bravo, said everyone else. The limits of memory. The wisdom of plants. The eye of parasites. The agility of the earth. The merit of the soldier. The cunning of the giant. The hole of the will. Magnificent, said my good friend Ulises in German. Extraordinary.

~ Roberto Bolaño

Where were you when I undressed and told the tales of my day?Where were youwhenI was silent with God in prandial pray?Where were youwhen I recited love poems as I lay?Where were you?

~ Kamand Kojouri

Just because the ones we love die (or fall out of our lives or disappear from the spinning of our spheres) does not mean we love them any less or erase them from the deeply etched lines of the maps we have traveled.We find ways to keep them alive in spirit, with the brutal knowing that they are gone in body.We can remember; we can feel & this can all be grief & it can all be love, too.

~ Bryonie Wise

When young, the humans are all Imagination because Memory is so much smaller a part of their experience, so little of them is grounded in it. As they grow older, however, Memory overtakes their Imagination, outweighs it. But when they pray with ever increasing confidence, they see with an ever-increasing and youthful Imagination and such burgeoning of possibility causes even their Memory to be lightened and redeemed. The scales fall from their eyes and they wait on their Father with the same childlike wonder that watches a sunrise to see what might happen this time.

~ Geoffrey Wood

I never knew him. We both knew this place, apparently, this literal small backwater, looked at it long enough to memorize it, our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved, or its memory is (it must have changed a lot). Our visions coincided--'visions' is too serious a word--our looks, two looks: art 'copying from life' and life itself, life and the memory of it so compressed they've turned into each other. Which is which? Life and the memory of it cramped, dim, on a piece of Bristol board, dim, but how live, how touching in detail --the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust. Not much. About the size of our abidance along with theirs: the munching cows, the iris, crisp and shivering, the water still standing from spring freshets, the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

~ Elizabeth Bishop

Time passes by, memory staysTorturing silently, rest of our days... Sigh!

~ Aanchal Negi

A memory made alone abides in isolation; such is love that is never shared. Fill your life with shared memories and love, and in the end you will have lived.

~ Lynda I Fisher

Memory is a barricade against forgetting; light is a bulwark against darkness; life is a flex against the stillness of the grave. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here, clear a space in all the debris, through all the anxieties and worries, where I can just exist, easily and simply, entire, for as long as I have left.

~ Helen Humphreys

Nature endowed human beings with two teleological components that define our essential humanity: consciousness and memory. Consciousness enables people to make decisions, and memory allows us to learn and share our accumulated knowledge. Cognitive endowments of consciousness and knowledge allow people to ascribe a meaning to existence, by establishing a direction and purpose to their life.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Some of the test subjects were given cards that had both words printed in full, like this:Hot: ColdOthers used cards that showed only the first letter of the second word, like this:Hot: CThe people who used the cards with the missing letters performed much better in a subsequent test measuring how well they remembered the word pairs. Simply forcing their minds to fill in a blank, to act rather than observe, led to stronger retention of information.

~ Nicholas Carr