Memory Quotes

The problem with memories is they get more valuable with time, and the places we keep them get weaker with age.

~ Michael Xavier

For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, pinging pebbles at an empty can.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

The experience of life should mature you. It is your choice to transform a memory into a wound or wisdom.

~ Sadghuru

I still notice the burned house, mornings, when I walk along the beach. Well, obviously I do not notice the house. What I notice is what remains of the house. One is still prone to think of a house as a house, however, even if there is not remarkably much left of it.

~ David Markson

Sentiments, as I have found, can be harvested from places where our memories are fondest.

~ Fennel Hudson

Every work cancels the dark. Every work is a hymn from the other side of memory to a memory that is spellbound. Beauty is death's gift to vulgar life so that it can live in beauty.

~ Edmond Jabès

It may not seem like much - a few kisses in the dark - but it was enough to burn a hole like an ulcer in my heart.

~ Jean Kwok

It's a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man's life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness.

~ John Steinbeck

Memory of the knife will be gone when the flesh is gone.

~ John Steinbeck

The enchantments of the past must always become the disenchantments of the future. But memory, a preservative, may intervene. The embalmer of original enchantments, it is the only human faculty that can outwit the advance of chronological time. Art, the embalmer of memory, is the only human vocation in which the time regained by memory can be permanently fixed.

~ Howard Moss

It felt like the times were good, like we were remembering a time before Rachel died, even though things were never this good then, because they were just normal, and ordinary is never the kind if good you remember.

~ Zoe Whittall

Memories wasn't a place, memories was in the mind.

~ Ernest J. Gaines

Time thins the cloth of memory. As the ages pass, its rich colors fade. Strong wool is beaten by the elements until the pattern of its lesson disintegrates, leaving holes in the truth it was meant to carry on. Even the stains of blood bend and bleed, leaving but faded blotches without meaning, mere shadows of lessons that came before, their warnings lost within the obscure impression that remains.

~ Melissa Mcphail

I am remembering something. At first it comes to me as a feeling. It is comforting. It is a place I want to be. It is home. Is it the memory of a dream? It is indistinct, but real. I am holding only a thread. And I do not want to let go.

~ Richard Payment

Fear no more as long as her memory surrounds you like a ghost…cry no more as long as she weeps for you like a willow.

~ Munia Khan

Missing someone is the reverberating echo of everything beautiful about her—her laugh, her song, her touch, her smell, the power of her words, and the constant shadow that lingers on as her perfect image in your memory.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it this brokenness inside me might start healing. Out here its like I'm someone else, I thought that maybe I could find myself if I could just come in I swear I'll leave. Won't take nothing but a memory from the house that built me.

~ Miranda Lambert

My hate is stronger than the dimensions, stronger than memory, stronger than time. My hate is now the truest part of who I am.

~ Claudia Gray

When it comes to Jews, you have a two-thousand-year memory, but when it comes to us Palestinians, you have a sixty-year amnesia.

~ Suad Amiry

Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist.

~ Charles Simic

The instant is gone, time has carried us into the realm of memory, it was like this, no, it was not, and everything becomes what we choose to invent.

~ José Saramago

We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.

~ Colum Mccann

I was a really good waitress. Waitressing takes a certain gusto. You need a good memory and an ability to connect with people fast. You have to learn how to treat the kitchen as well as you treat the customers. You have to figure out which crazy people to listen to and which crazy people to ignore. I loved waiting tables because when you cashed out at the end of the night your job was truly over. You wiped down your section and paid out your busboy and you knew your work was done.

~ Amy Poehler

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory--part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction....What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

~ Susan Sontag

When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind? And what is it we expect from the sun-drenched past? There is no formula for re-entry, nothing we can do to enable reconstruction.

~ Jane Urquhart

Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living.
that’s the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred years or only a few weeks. It’s all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers.

~ Sara Sheridan

This country awakens so many memories, though each seems like some restless sparrow I know will flee any moment into the breeze.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

For me, time does not seem to pass; rather, it surrounds me. Thus I do not feel removed from memories, nor do they lose their intensity. I have keen recollections not because I have a good memory—I simply retrieve them from the ether. When memories have no velocity, they are very much at hand.

~ Peter Ruperte Lighte

This is the story I am working on. But it isn't complete as I don't have the right way to begin. I sit on the crosshouse floor and look at the objects. I see different ways they could be put together and the way the story changes over time. The objects fall into their groupings and they talk to each other in different fashions depending on where they're put and at first it makes me panic. I put the memories together again and again in their different patterns and try to understand which is the correct way. Then at last I see that there isn't one. I see that if I am lucky and do it right, the story will not ever come together in one final meaning. Because there is not yet any end.

~ Anna Smaill

Didn’t young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?

~ Sara Sheridan

It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.

~ Sara Sheridan

We don't forget...Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, smells of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us of who we are.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

God always provides a pleasant memory to help ease the pain of a bad experience.

~ Peggy Toney Horton

Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course.

~ Joseph Joubert

The evening's light, silvery, casts its dull brightness onto the trees--trees gelid in this blue light of winter. But whiteness dominates with the pines and evergreens steeped in vibrant grades of silver. I hear notes in the mist, like silvery chattering, coins in a pocket, the jangle of keys. Pg 217

~ S.k. Kalsi

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

~ Marcel Proust

I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should not probably forget all about them.

~ Oscar Wilde

Maybe to have a memory you need time for reflection, however brief, just to let the memory find a place to settle.

~ Alex Garland

His memory is perfectly clearand serves no good, no purposeat all. He has seen things before(the fly in the bottle,the indeterminate will).Santa Muerte, Saint Death,we pray to you to swallow our breath.

~ Michael Palmer

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

~ Günter Grass