Memory Quotes

Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.

~ Neil Gaiman

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' says the White Queen to Alice.

~ Lewis Carroll

Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

~ Salman Rushdie

That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

How can you just forget a person completely until the moment you see his face again?

~ Melina Marchetta

Sometimes you can’t let go of the past without facing it again.

~ Gail Tsukiyama

When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot.

~ Ann Brashares

Only those with no memory insist on their originality.

~ Coco Chanel

Because I might not always have you but I'll have the feeling of you for the rest of my life

~ Pleasefindthis

Most have been forgotten. Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best. The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both.

~ George R.r. Martin

He looked at the silver pocketknife in his hand. An idea came to him – possibly the stupidest, craziest idea he’d had since he thought, Hey, I’ll get Percy to swim in the River Styx! He’ll love me for that!

~ Rick Riordan

Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.

~ Mark Lawrence

I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.

~ Kris Kristofferson

People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things - where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance - but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting. I am exhausted from the effort to forget... There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.

~ Stephen Carpenter

I feel as if I had opened a book and found roses of yesterday sweet and fragrant, between its leaves.

~ L.m. Montgomery

Memory believes before knowing remembers.[Light in August]

~ William Faulkner

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

~ Julian Barnes

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.

~ Frederick Buechner

The people you love become ghosts inside of you, and like this you keep them alive.

~ Rob Montgomery

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

~ Martin Amis

Grey rocks, and greyer sea, And surf along the shore -- And in my heart a name My lips shall speak no more.

~ Charles G.d. Roberts

The thing with giving up is you never know. You never know whether you could have done the job. And I'm sick of not knowing about my life.

~ Sophie Kinsella

Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~Candle

~ Gregory Maguire

Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.

~ Neil Gaiman

No one tells us, girls who don't go on dates, that remembering can be almost as good as what actually happens.

~ Kathryn Stockett

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.

~ Saki

The general root of superstition : namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.

~ Francis Bacon

He remembered Apollo, smiling and tanned and completely cool in his shades. Thalia had said, He’s hot. He’s the sun god, Percy replied. That’s not what I meant. Why was Nico thinking about that now? The random memory irritated him, made him feel jittery.

~ Rick Riordan

Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

Footfalls echo in the memorydown the passage we did not taketowards the door we never openedinto the rose garden. My words echothus, in your mind

~ T.s. Eliot

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

~ Julio Cortázar

The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.

~ Tennessee Williams

Sometimes I wanted to take a memory - one perfect memory - curl up in it, and go to sleep.

~ Kiersten White

Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.

~ Haruki Murakami

Man's memory shapesIts own Eden within

~ Jorge Luis Borges

It didn’t take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory.

~ Ali Shaw

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

~ Amy Tan

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

~ Julian Barnes

A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.

~ J.m. Barrie