Memory Quotes

He remembered how nice the kids at Camp Half-Blood had been to him after the war with Kronos. Great job, Nico! Thanks for bringing the armies of the Underworld to save us! Everybody smiled. They all invited him to sit at their table. After about a week, his welcome wore thin. Campers would jump when he walked up behind them. He would emerge from the shadows at the campfire, startle somebody and see the discomfort in their eyes: Are you still here? Why are you here? It didn’t help that immediately after the war with Kronos, Annabeth and Percy had started dating … Nico set down his fartura. Suddenly it didn’t taste so good.

~ Rick Riordan

It wasn't the sort of kiss I'd had with him before, hungry, wanting, desperate. It wasn't the sort of kiss I'd had with anyone before. This kiss was so soft that it was like a memory of a kiss, so careful on my lips that it was like someone running his fingers along them.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

~ Jodi Picoult

Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!

~ Vladimir Nabokov

I will continue my path, but I will keep a memory always.

~ Rosie Thomas

Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.

~ Amy Bloom

I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.

~ Marilynne Robinson

We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten

~ Cesare Pavese

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.

~ Ann Patchett

I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.

~ Neil Gaiman

And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

But maybe that's what the dead do. They stay. They linger. Benign and sweet and painful. They don't need us. They echo all by themselves.

~ Sangu Mandanna

Even knowing, as I do now, that grace, power, and, yes, love can hide the darkest elements of the human heart, I would do it all again.

~ Chelsey Philpot

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

~ Colum Mccann

Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory

~ James Stephens

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

~ Robert Penn Warren

A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos—like amber in which a memory gets trapped.

~ Michael Chabon

I always think everything is going to last forever, but nothing ever does. In fact nothing exists longer than an instant except the thing that we hold in memory

~ Sam Savage

In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgment.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

Harold Hill: You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. I don't know about you, but I'd like to make today worth remembering.

~ Meredith Willson

I think the secret to a hoppy life is a selective memory. Remember what you are most grateful for and quickly forget what your not.

~ Richard Paul Evans

It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.

~ Lisa Unger

What is the past but what we choose to remember?

~ Amy Tan

She could sense it very clearly: for me, no less than for her, the past counted far more than the present, remembering something far more than possessing it. Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing, banal, inadequate ... She understood me so well! My anxiety that the present 'immediately' turned into the past so that I could love it and dream about it at leisure was just like hers, was identical. It was 'our' vice, this: to go forwards with our heads forever turned back.

~ Giorgio Bassani

It was one of those strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of his life. There was no telling what made these moments different from any other, though he knew them when they came. He had seen sights more gruesome and more beautiful by far, and been left with no more than a fleeting muddle of their memory. But these-- the still moments, as he called them to himself-- they came with no warning, to print a random image of the most common things inside his brain, indelible.

~ Diana Gabaldon

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised them the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt 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) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.

~ Marcel Proust

I fear it is my lot, to bide my days in hunchbacked thought, to find what I forgot.

~ Roman Payne

That brief walk was one of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.[p214]

~ John Green

Soon or late, every dog's master's memory becomes a graveyard; peopled by wistful little furry ghosts that creep back unbidden, at times, to a semblance of their olden lives.

~ Albert Payson Terhune

What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that's what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they'd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the paint and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

~ John Lahr

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

~ Gaston Bachelard

Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.

~ Anne Rice

He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

~ Julian Barnes

Memory is like a curse. We fall into eternity, and memory is a weight that keeps pulling us to where we can never go back to.

~ José Luís Peixoto

Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.

~ Michael Ignatieff

A kind of memory that tells usthat what we're now striving for was oncenearer and truer and attached to uswith infinite tenderness. Here all is distance,there it was breath. After the first homethe second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón