Memory Quotes

... so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

~ Marcel Proust

The smooth, flat rocks were exactly the same, the sea pounded down on them in the same way, and also the landscape under the water, with its small valleys and bays and steep chasms and slopes, strewn with starfish and sea urchins, crabs and fish, was the same. You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyrolia bindings and Koflach boots. The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq soccer boots was just a pair of soccer boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn’t, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.

~ Karl Ove Knausgård

But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shews us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray.

~ Marcel Proust

The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air;...

~ Marcel Proust

Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise?

~ Marcel Proust

Memory's got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.

~ Ian Mcewan

Aygi Cycle (4)Coarse hawthornbeloved uncle'smemory entwinedamong itsgnarled andarmored limbscopy ofLolita byhis deathbed

~ Michael Palmer

Nod house turned into shouthouse. In the shout house memorysaid shut up. It said silence,misery said amen, the mule'sheadmeant my stubborn lungs. . .I stoodimagining I fell back dreaming,stuck tongue stuck in my jawbrokemy jaw

~ Nathaniel Mackey

His memory is perfectly clearand serves not 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

There was something in the back of my brain, tapping its fingers on the door to my memory.

~ Tim Omara

Medieval illustrations of the mind from the fourteenth century depict memories like snakes feeding into the imagination and, long before this, both Aristotle and Galen described memories not as archives of our lives, but as tools for the imagination.

~ Claudia Hammond

Neurotic guilt scans the horizons of the past relentlessly seeking out the most deplorable, hideous, and culpable acts which are least consistent with one's self image. This process is similar to the infinite passion of intensified anxiety for seeking the worst conceivable possibilities in order to alert the whole organism to potential danger.

~ Thomas C. Oden

There's no way to really preserve a person when they've gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth; it's just a story. Stories are all we're ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.

~ Steven Hall

He thought of his remembrance of Jordan, thought of how it hurt to even look at Isabelle and Clary. Without memory, they were lost. And nobody wanted someone they loved to be lost.

~ Cassandra Clare

No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The I is chained to ancestry by many factors… This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.

~ Erwin Schrödinger

He's not learning. He's not experiencing. He's remembering.He walks to the next screen, hungry to be himself again.

~ James Dashner

What is this 'I'? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by 'I' is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones. Less and less important will become the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one. 'The youth that was I', you may come to speak of him in the third person, indeed the protagonist of the novel you are reading is probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you. Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death. And even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.

~ Erwin Schrödinger

With a little heartache; Gone with the time, Are certain memories, Intricately designed.To call & narrate A story of blissful sunshine.

~ Somya Kedia

It’s what we’re all trying to do, right? Remember a time that was better. Re-create a moment of that memory as we let the crisp Coke bubble down our throats. Riding bikes on a summer day. Sitting on the curb and watching the streetlights come on. Playing in the sprinklers with a group of neighbor kids. We’re all trying to salvage a time when we dreamed beyond our reality and thought monsters were under our beds instead of peppering our family trees. We’re trying to harness those fleeting moments that turned our ordinary lives into something extraordinary. In the sepia haze of those memories, we are beautiful.

~ Liza Palmer

When men do not forget what can be forgotten but forget what cannot be forgotten - that may be called true forgetting.

~ Zhuangzi

We are the things we don't remember,the blank spaces, the forgotten words.

~ Cecilia Ruiz

Some people would never forget certain people, a few people would remember everyone, and most of us would mostly be forgotten.

~ Joshua Ferris

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

~ Walter Benjamin

She used to wander through the past as often as it beckoned her, bemoaning the loss of nostalgia. Then, for a while, she turned from it, blissfully free of its noxious clutch, and now it's back, taunting her with what she left behind, knowing she can never recapture what's gone.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

I'm not perfect, I'm beautifully imperfect

~ Shujoy Chowdhury

And the pine trees that smell so wonderfully of spicy power. Shall I never see a mountain pine again? Really that would be no misfortune. To forgo something: that also has its fragrance and its power.

~ Robert Walser

Images are the pegs holding down memory's billowing tent.

~ Frances Mayes

But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we came.That is why history should be taught in school. to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.

~ Penelope Lively

Today and every day, live and lead the memory you want to leave behind.

~ Jon Mertz

...education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can't have higher-level learning- you can't analyze-without retrieving information.' And you can't retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between learning and memorizing is false, Matthews contends. You can't learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can't memorize without learning.

~ Joshua Foer

I don't want to be memorized for everyone. I want to stay real,endless and inchangeable for my parents, kids and their descendants.

~ Alexander Zalan

...first, in order to remember, something must be forgotten; second, the place where memories are stored has no boundaries. In other words, forgetting is a twin; its tandem effect is best called simultancous distraction, the instant when one memory defoliates another. This fuzzy double - one devouring the other - presumably inhibits learning

~ Norman Klein

If you don't write it down, it never happened.Cathy (& Jack) Ryan

~ Tom Clancy

You may forget the one with whom you have laughed, but never the one with whom you have wept.

~ Kahlil Gibran

He doesn't know who I am.

~ Marie Lu

I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.

~ Ruth Ozeki

I was sad to leave, but I was also pleased to have met people outside of Sierra Leone. Because if I was to get killed upon my return, I knew that a memory of my existence was alive somewhere in the world.

~ Ishmael Beah

Just remember: If you make unfounded assumptions before choosing a path, you’re blindly sauntering along.

~ Auliq Ice

The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.

~ Milan Kundera

It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around...

~ Frederick Buechner