Memory Quotes

When I returned to camp, they walked behind me on the trail, and we spoke not a word about getting skunked today, but rather talked about the days we returned with a stringer full of fish, and how we filleted them and the left the guts out for bears and eagles, and how those fish tasted fresh when we fried them over a fire.

~ Daniel J. Rice

Women do not lie about their age. In fact, no woman ever has, its just that memory is the first thing to go.

~ David C. Holley

You may ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnesses for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

~ Ford Madox Ford

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end grows near, each moment becomes more and more valuable and there is no time to waste on recollection. It's important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia, that it is most powerful in early youth , when the volume of life that has passed is quite small.

~ Milan Kundera

Facts you can bend. Memories are much stronger things.

~ Isvari

Nobody told me about him [my grandfather], and he died when I was six, and yet within the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been born and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well. It is rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially for the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though children may not understand what is said and done before them, and have no interest in it at the time, and though they may forget it at once and for years, yet these things that they have seen and heard and not noticed have after all impressed themselves for ever on their minds, and when they are men and women come crowing back with surprising and often painful distinctness, and away frisk all the cherished little illusions in flocks.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

But I remember the place with fondness ... not perfect but, all in all, not a bad memory.

~ Diane Meier

Perhaps memory is like a bucket; if you want to cram into it more fruit than it will hold, the fruit is crushed.

~ Primo Levi

The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it's the study of historians' studies. . . .Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

~ David Mitchell

There are photographs of people you don't recognize and photographs of you in ways you don't wish to be remembered, but they each contain elements of places or times you do not wish to forget.

~ Diane Meier

Regard for the past only extends to its outward forms.

~ Henrik Bering

Other than that, we have each told the truth, and each truth is our own.

~ Liz Welch

Rhythm becoming thought, thought becoming memory; memory, which tends to shuck itself, to peel away. You get older, look back through a child's tunnel vision, and realize you never knew the whole that tied the details together. You were just along for the ride, moving from experience to experience, a flat spectacle, some kind of guideless tour. You remember--or think you remember--what happened, but not where, or why. What you did, but not with who. Details fade. People's names get lost in the white noise.

~ Gemma Files

The conscious mind is intended as a focusing tool, not a storing place.

~ Matthew Perman

A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur.

~ V.s. Naipaul

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

So - people a thousand years from now...This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

~ Thornton Wilder

The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask tobe imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.

~ Paul Fussell

As usual, he saves his wife's for last. He leans on the cane and he looks at the headstone and he thinks about many things. Taffy. He thinks about taffy. He thinks it would take his teeth out now, but he would eat it anyhow, if it meant eating it with her.

~ Mitch Albom

What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence?

~ Joshua Foer

Perhaps love is like a resting place, a shelter from the storm. It exists to give you comfort, it is there to keep you warm, and in those times of trouble when you are most alone, the memory of love will bring you home.

~ John Denver

We look at the world once, in childhood.The rest is memory

~ Louise Glück

Happiness is in love, in service, and in beautiful memory.

~ Debasish Mridha

Life is a journey, education is our pleasure and our memory.

~ Debasish Mridha

The magic of love is that it becomes our memory which we never can forget.

~ Debasish Mridha

It is impossible for me to remember how many days or weeks went by in this way. Time is round, and it rolls quickly.

~ Nikos Kazantzakis

There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ's sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It's all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It's all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries.

~ Harry Leslie Smith

You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating themlike sutras Xuan Zhang fetched from India, testing waysreturn might be possible against these homesick inventions, trace the traveller's alien steps across borders, and in between discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns grew out of not knowing whether to return or to stay, and then became home.

~ Boey Kim Cheng

But memory is less disposed to compromise

~ Albert Camus

There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.

~ Richard Holmes

People are more likely to remember the great social interaction they had with a colleague than the great meeting they both attended.

~ Ron Garan

I can’t give up my faith in the longpaws. I understand that we can’t rely on the longpaws to help us anymore. But one of us has to remember. One of us has to carry the memories for the rest of the Pack. I’ll do it.

~ Erin Hunter

Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer. They control the most simple Proustian episode, and an understanding of their mechanism must precede any particular analysis of their application.

~ Samuel Beckett

We can choose not to remember this day, but bones have strong memories. And earth never forgets.

~ Magaly Guerrero

The magnitude of any one day is compromised by its passing quickly into the next, a mere moment in time which soon fades into the collective memory of our past.

~ Timothy W. Tron

There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.

~ David Nicholls

But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like those about journeys to countries where nobody has ever been.

~ Marcel Proust

Hold each moment you create on your sacred journey close to your heart, for that is the location where your memory will be deposited.

~ Molly Friedenfeld

I felt the kiss still there on my forehead. Literally. It was frozen there. I could still feel it. I wanted to bronze it, like people do with baby shoes. I wanted to mount it and hang it over my mantelpiece.

~ Catherine Ryan Hyde

The Place would already have started the leisurely, enjoyable process of digesting her into just one more piece of local gore-lore, half ghost story and half morality play, half urban myth and half just the way life goes. It would eat her memory whole, the same way its ground had eaten her body.

~ Tana French