Memory Quotes

And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.

~ Marcel Proust

After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don't have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!

~ Steve Toltz

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

~ Italo Calvino

But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

~ Marcel Proust

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.

~ Julio Cortázar

And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.

~ Mohsin Hamid

I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.

~ Jacqueline Woodson

Smells, I think, may be the last thing on earth to die.

~ Fern Schumer Chapman

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

~ Erich Maria Remarque

When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.

~ Alice Hoffman

This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products

~ Larry Mccaffrey

I thought you had forgotten me.”“I have spent my life remembering you.

~ Meredith Ann Pierce

She knew with suddeness and ease that this moment would be with her always, within hand's reach of memory.She doubted if they all sensed it - they had seen the world - but even George was silent for a minute as they looked, and the scene, the smell, even the sound of the band playing a faintly recognisable movie theme, was locked forever in her, and she was at peace.

~ Stephen King

Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.

~ Julio Cortázar

We need falsifications to make the past inhabitable.

~ Frans Kellendonk

While Dmitri, as the leader of Raphael’s Seven, could not accept such a weakness, the mortal he’d once been, the one who had loved a woman with a wide mouth and eyes of slanted brown . . . that man understood what it was to love so deeply it was a kind of beautiful madness.

~ Nalini Singh

I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.

~ Samantha Hunt

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

~ George Orwell

Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.

~ Michel De Montaigne

He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

~ Graham Greene

A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

Thus we try to keep our heroes alive, hence we remember them.

~ John Irving

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.

~ C.s. Lewis

December's wintery breath is already clouding the pond, frosting the pane, obscuring summer's memory...

~ John Geddes

Touch has a memory. O say, love, say,What can I do to kill it and be free?

~ John Keats

If snow melts down to water, does it still remember being snow?

~ Jennifer Mcmahon

You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.

~ Walter Benjamin

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

~ Terry Pratchett

To feel successful, you must be able to be honest about the things that are really important to you.

~ Daniel G. Amen

I looked around at the rooms that I did not see as rooms but more as a landscape for my emotions, a biography of memory.

~ Anne Spollen

Here's to many more firsts and many more great memories.

~ Christine Feehan

If you want to be able to recall everything and anything in detail,then you need to be strong enough to feel all bad memories as well.

~ Toba Beta

And of the fact that every vision of the past is a vision of the blind

~ Jacques Roubaud

Sometimes Midas suspected that life was a film with subliminal messages. Things would move along with an acceptable degree of predictability, then be punctuated by some horrible childhood memory.

~ Ali Shaw

Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world.

~ Daniel J. Siegel

Memory is the basis of every journey.

~ Stephen King

The only thing faster than the speed of thought is the speed of forgetfulness. Good thing we have other people to help us remember.

~ Vera Nazarian

It is warm, I am alive, I am calm and sad, I hardly know why. In this existence so even, so tranquil, and so gentle as I have here, I am in an element that weakens me morally while strengthening me physically; and I fall into melancholies of honey and roses which are none the less melancholy. It seems to me that all those I love forget me, and that it is justice, because I live a selfish life having nothing to do for any one of them.

~ George Sand

Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.

~ Kim Stanley Robinson