Memory Quotes

Memory is the enemy of wonder

~ Michael Pollan

Looking at things is never time wasted. If your children want to stand and stare, let them. When I was marvelling at the beauty of a painting or enjoying a great view it did not occur to me that the experience, however intense, would be of value many years later. But there it has remained, tucked away in hidden bits of my mind and now it comes, shouldering aside even the most passionate love affairs.

~ Diana Athill

She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.

~ Ray Bradbury

Those are the facts but not the truth, which does not even speak the same language.

~ Sonja Livingston

That echo. It played in his head at unexpected moments, repeating certain sounds and making nonsense of them. But could you remember an echo? Memory itself was like another kind of echo, everything duplicating endlessly, in shadow versions of itself.

~ Damon Galgut

The flowers in Tibet were always taller, more fragrant and vivid. Her descriptions, imprecise but unchanging from year to year lead me to an inevitable acceptance that her past was unequaled by our present lives. She would tell me of knee-deep fields of purple, red and white- plants never named or pointed out to during our years in India and Nepal- that over time served to create an idea of her fatherland, phayul, as a riotous garden. I pictured her wilderness paradise by comparing them not to the marigolds, daises or bluebells I crushed with my fingers, but to the shape of household artefacts around me: lollipop, broom, bottle. Disparate objects that surrendered to and influenced the idea, space and hope of a more abundant and happy place.

~ Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

It's precarious to hang onto the veracity of memory because its edges are smoothed by the river of time.

~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen

We try so hard to put our mark on things, we like to tell ourselves that what we do has import or will last. But the truth is, we're all just passing through. So little survives us. And when we're gone, it's simply the memory of others that keeps our time here alive. And when they're gone... That's why - when I go - I'm asking that my dust gets tossed on the water. Because ends up floating away.

~ Douglas Kennedy

It is a long time ago. So many lives ago--I get them all confused, don’t you?

~ Kim Stanley Robinson

He had talked to hundreds of witnesses. And he knew that if someone felt pressured, they would try too hard, and their imagination would fill what their memory couldn't recover.

~ Chelsea Cain

How fickle it is, memory— preferring some days to others, granting first a blue sky, offering next the sound of laughter, swelling our remembrances until a largeness seeps into the grain of things and memory itself becomes billowed and flapping.

~ Sonja Livingston

The feeling of loathing had as yet no permanence or strength in the dog’s soul. The newly awakened joy of life transformed every sensation into a great joke, into gaiety. Nimrod kept on barking, but the tone of it had changed imperceptibly, had become a parody of what it had been - an attempt to express the incredible wonder of that capital enterprise, life, so full of unexpected encounters, pleasures, and thrills.

~ Bruno Schulz

Rucksacks. What do people whose life stops here take with them? Makina could see their rucksacks crammed with time. Amulets, letters, sometimes a huapango violin, sometimes a jaranera harp. Jackets. People who left took jackets because they’d been told that if there was one thing they could be sure of over there, it was the freezing cold, even if it was desert all the way. They hid what little money they had in their underwear and stuck a knife in their back pocket. Photos, photos, photos. They carried photos like promises but by the time they came back they were in tatters.

~ Yuri Herrera

It was haunted, but real hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts finally, they have to do with the menace of memory.

~ Anne Rice

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.

~ Milan Kundera

I loved you without knowing it, and I looked for your memory.In empty houses I entered with a lantern to steal your portrait

~ Pablo Neruda

The more she tried to forget, the more she remembered.

~ T.k. Kiser

But that day it was raining, and since they couldn't very well sit on the rooftop in the rain to watch the flotilla parade, they stayed in the little room that led to the roof. It had just one tiny window through which the gray light of day filtered in. They sat on the floor, and Lorenzo's senses were aroused by the sound of the rain falling outside, the musky smell of his own body, and the fragrant scent of Caterina's hair. A single blonde strand wound down her slim neck.They kissed, taking off their rain-washed summer clothes so that their bodies pressed, naked, against one another. Long, delicate lovemaking. Caresses, kisses, shivers, and sighs of delight.Lorenzo would have gladly spend the rest of his life preserved in that single moment, as if in amber, abandoning reality to live in the memory of that one single day.

~ Riccardo Bruni

We paw at nostalgia even before we hit twenty, wanting a holiday that never happened, a wholesomeness that could not survive in the wild.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

I remembered his laugh, like a flock of crows taking off

~ Maggie Stiefvater

He'd done this hundreds of times: done a job, been drugged with a narcotic that erased his short term memory, and dumped in a seedy hole in the wall locale, where when he climbed out, he would have to figure out where he was, find a payphone, and call in for his next job.

~ Jennifer Arnett

You cannot forget, despite the effort to block the memories. These horrific remnants of your past will still remain in your brain, they will follow you wherever you go. They are the things that have scarred you.

~ Athena_Griffinclaw_Erudite

It is easy to create a memory, but it is almost impossible to forget.

~ Debasish Mridha

War ends at the moment when peace permanently wins out. Not when the articles of surrender are signed or the last shot is fired, but when the last shout of a sidewalk battle fades, when the next generation starts to wonder whether the whole thing ever really happened. World War II ended as war always ends -- by trailing off into nothingness and doubt. Its final monument has never been seen by mortal eyes. It's a phantom image at the edge of a rumor: an unmarked grave in the depths of the South American jungle where a weird and decrepit old man, half forgotten by the world, at last entered the lists of oblivion.

~ Lee Sandlin

We all have an eraser incorporated within us, a delete key, but we forget how to use it. Ho’oponopono helps us to remember the power that we have to choose between erasing (letting go) or reacting, being happy or suffering. It is only a matter of choice in every moment of our lives.

~ Mabel Katz

We may deny the truth of our childhoods while we are living them, but we one day realize the truth of our parents as readily as we do that of Santa. Neither are as perfect as our memories would have them…

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Maybe I have never had the Christmas I remember, since we never remember the event itself but just the last time we revisited the memory. I have woven together a few dozen scraps (the Sears catalog, my father videoing everything we did, Christmas parties and visits with Santa) and pretended they amount to one perfect, cohesive moment, but I am as guilty as baby-boomers, who dictated unconsciously that all the songs they listened to in 1963 would be the timeless Christmas standards of today.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

We want so badly to be happy – to live the kinds of lives that we always hoped we’d live – that we give gifts to ourselves by remembering things not as they were, but as we wish they were.

~ Dathan Auerbach

And I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.

~ June Jordan

We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.

~ Patti Smith

Sometimes forgetting is the gift that we give ourselves

~ Dathan Auerbach

Every day it’s something worse being predicted. Mearth says that sooner or later copyright on books will be all in the past because they’ll all be available electronically. She says that electric cars will replace gasoline-powered cars. She says that something called drones will be used to watch the entire country, she talks a lot about something called nanotechnology, and 3-dimensional printing and cellular phones being implanted into peoples’ minds and all available careers being replaced by robots and human cloning and overpopulation and film becoming obsolete, cellular phones making regular telephones obsolete and LED lighting replacing everything and eventually she says that the planet will collapse and become an apathetic wreck,” Alecto replied rapidly, his run-on sentence sounding sinister and dangerous. “Mearth says that eventually people will be able to see inside the minds of everyone.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

Time, the thing we can't beat back... Yet, time is also what it takes to heal, what it takes for certain memory cells to die. Maybe time doesn't heal. Maybe it doesn't even pass. We pass through time, and come out stunned, so rage, and memory, are blurred.

~ Kiana Davenport

Dark, cool, musty, smoky, where light fell funny and everyone looked like someone you knew or wanted to know. Or, more likely, wanted to forget.

~ David Baldacci

There is only one moment; its events are infinitely unfolding, increasing at every passing second—meaning that they were somehow compressed before. This moment was never smaller, but less beauty was exposed in the physical form, yet still this flower blooms. I think we tend to see time as the events alone; in this sense, we view objects as a means of measurement to time. But we forget the place of events in time is change. I am the measurement to my own happiness; time is the breadth of that beauty, and that beauty is the measurement of this moment’s grandeur. Somehow compressed, potential beauty was enfolded infinitely from the start of time, and now waits in vain for its fullest blossoming.The fact that there is a progression to time proves that time is not infinite; you can’t approach infinity. Time is more like a dot, expanding on a plane that is infinite; but that dot may as well not be growing, because the plane that its on is growing too. Stagnant, this explains what we call “now” that moment, ever unfolding; matter changes, but not the moment; the only proof that a past exists is our memories. What did it feel like to be four? Like now. My memories of a past are an illusion, because they take place in the now, the one moment.

~ Matthew Holbert

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.

~ Marcel Proust

But it’s a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go. The adrenaline that let our ancestors escape the sabertooth tiger sears into the meat of our brains the extraordinary, the loud. The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

~ Mary Karr

Jehanne said that it would always be like this. That I would always be young and beautiful in her memory, and she in mine. That I would never grow resentful, never be tempted to betray her. That she would never grow restless and fickle, and see to replace me. So you see, not exactly the sentiments of a great and terrible love affair.

~ Jacqueline Carey

You never know what the vodka will bring,” I laughed.“Oh, like the time you caught my hair on fire at the candlelight party in Mel’s basement! That was the craziest thing that I ever had happen to me. If you hadn’t switched to water, I would have been bald!”-Cora, Nessa

~ Andrea Heltsley

In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory, the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

~ Milan Kundera