Memory Quotes

No. I remember. So long as I don't think about it too much, my hands and feet take over; some memory locked into muscle that my brain has nothing to do with.I know how to drive. And I'm better at it than he is.

~ Teri Terry

And of all the rooms in my childhood,God was the largestand most empty.

~ Li-Young Lee

Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream. Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done. All the lost things that may one day call to me, the faces of my children who will one day call to me. Maybe we can't draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole.

~ Patti Smith

What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.

~ Edmund Wilson

To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget. A memorable sandwich, an unmemorable flight of stairs. A memorable bit of conversation surrounded by chatter that no one records.

~ Sarah Manguso

Memory is all I have now

~ James Patterson

It's late at night when the memory comes for me, like it always seems to when the relief of sleep seems ready to draw me under.

~ Joaquin Lowe

In the serenity and quiet of this lovely place, touch the depths of truth, feel the hem of Heaven. And when you leave, don't forget why you came...

~ Oksana Rus

Every memory we have changes slightly each time we think about it. We add stuff we learn in other places, or we forget stuff that doesn't seem important anymore. Or you think you remember something, like from your childhood, but actually you've just seen so many pictures of it, and your parents have told you about it, so you think you remember it, but you don't. A memory is a process. Instead of a thing. Like a story we tell ourselves that changes from the standpoint we're looking at it.

~ Katherine Howe

There was something brittle about her, and he feared she would snap apart at the slightest touch; she had thrown herself so fiercely into this, the erasing of memory, that it would destroy her.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Portland was a dream both in the literal sense and the metaphorical sense, both tangible and not - a fleeting affair you want to hold on to but can't, so you try memorizing her every detail only to fail to do so in the consumption, in the savoring, in the absorbing of yourself into her. When she's gone, she comes to you in snippets, replaying in your mind like a fragmented picture show.

~ Jackie Haze

I'm sure that you didn't think I would notice,but we memorize the strangest things in a personwhen we're in love with them.

~ Danabelle Gutierrez

It was as if the body disdained memory... or refused the responsibility of it.

~ Stephen King

Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary

~ Anthony Doerr

People have two deaths: the first at the end of their lives, when they go away, and the second at the end of the memory of their lives, when all who remember them are gone. Then a person quits the world completely.

~ Raghu Karnad

I had spent so much of life being afraid or living the memory of being afraid.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

the flicker of a memoryis all we can cling tofor our cherished ghostsFrom Cat Paws on a Windscreen

~ J.s. Watts

I should have been the King of Earth, or at least that's what my memory tells me...

~ Brad Mckinniss

I don't need a speech. I have all I need to say right up here. He pointed at his head in confidence.

~ Brad Mckinniss

Memories with laughter are the best ones to keep.

~ Dan Groat

The things we remember are what we hold on to. And what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives.

~ Katherine Center

We are our memory,we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,that pile of broken mirrors.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Dementia isn’t the only place that memories are found to be flawed—people find out they can’t rely on their memories every day. People blindsided in relationships. People who find out their truth is a lie. People pulled from trauma. People awakened, as in Anna and Eve. I wondered: If you can’t use memories to steer your life, what can you use? I didn’t know. It was why I had to write this book.

~ Sally Hepworth

Conscious access to memory is a unique trait of living things, but memory itself is not. It's encoded in the minute vibrations between elementary particles. Our entire universe is built of information given shape. Part of that is its history. Its memory.

~ M.r. Graham

The receding perspective of my past smothers my present. Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

~ Rabih Alameddine

It was one of the few stories we told the same way.

~ Gillian Flynn

Travel is an evolving experience. It doesn't take place in photographs or your past... Instead it's tucked up there in your memory and when you need a bit of it, or a new perspective on something hidden within it, it will emerge into your conscious mind

~ Dan Kieran

My students tag tables, walls, and chairs because their greatest fear is that no one will ever remember them. They do not believe they can give impassioned speeches, rally people in protest, paint masterpieces. They think they will die, small and forgotten, and it dictates their every action.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Fame is like drifting clouds, transient and ephemeral. Memory is forever.

~ Debasish Mridha

When you try to forget, you will never be able to do it. It will only create a stronger memory. You can’t erase an event or memory from your memory box or hippocampus. The memory will only get stronger.

~ Debasish Mridha

If you try to forget it, nothing can erase a memory.

~ Debasish Mridha

Levade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

~ Sebastian Faulks

Novelty has a way of intensifying memory. The less often you do something, the deeper the memory burrows in.

~ Meghan Daum

The print was an old one made from a negative taken in the 1960’s of her parents in Sydney Mines, dancing with thrilled, excited expressions on their faces, in front of a classic car that had been a wedding gift at the time. Her mother’s hair, red back then, was held back by a blue handkerchief, and she was dressed in a billowing skirt and white blouse. Her father’s denim jeans and faded t-shirt were streaked with coal dust as he held her hands and spun her around in the front yard of their old clapboard house, yellow grass under their feet and a cobalt-blue sky with white clouds drifting above. Mandy could almost feel the late summer breeze as she gazed deeply into the print, watching the flamboyant colors come to life. She hung it up to dry on two wooden clothespins hanging from a string above her.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

But that alteration, catastrophic though it was, had long been absorbed into the water table; the unspeakable day still flooded the downs. He wasn't the type to convince himself that facts were not facts, but he needed to stop living intolerable spans again. Surely it was enough to have lived them once.

~ H.s. Cross

That’s why you have to go and guilt him for all the trouble. It can’t be your fault that you lost your memory if he wasn’t smart enough to tell you about the wine.

~ Denny B. Reese

What I had experienced at the age of twenty was not yet a memory. And memory meant not that what-had-been recurring, but that what-had-been situated itself by recurring. If I remembered, I knew that an experience was thus and so, exactly thus; in being remembered, it first became known to me, nameable, voiced, speakable; accordingly I look on memory as more than haphazard thinking back - as work; the work of memory situates experience in a sequence that keeps it alive, a story which can open out into free storytelling, greater life, invention.

~ Peter Handke

Love is Short, Remembering is long

~ Jack Waddell

Do you think the memory of someone should dictate how we live going forward?' he asks, threading and unthreading his fingers together.'It depends,' I say. 'I think you can probably honor someone's memory, but you can't live for them, because that means living in the past.

~ Alexandra Bracken

Humans do not proceed in an orderly fashion from one scene to the next. Memory lies underneath happenstance, hope and dread sprawl on top. Our days and nights are their endless orgies.

~ Catherynne M. Valente