Memory Quotes

Memory is not a storage place but a story we tell ourselves in retrospect. As such, it is made of storytelling materials: embroidery and forgery, perplexity and urgency, revelation and darkness.

~ Noam Shpancer

You can never replace someone you love like that. Eventually the memories won’t be so hard on you. With time, the memories will make you smile and you will be grateful for having them.

~ N.m. Facile

I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us further away.

~ Sally Mann

If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase--not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been--what would you take? The last photograph you had of your mother? A birthday gift from your best friend--a bookmark embroidered by her? A ticket stub from the traveling circus that had come through town two years ago, where you and your father held your breath as jeweled ladies flew through the air, and a brave man stuck his head in the mouth of a lion? Would you take them to make wherever you were going feel like home, or because you needed to remember where you had come from?

~ Jodi Picoult

Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.

~ William James

Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.

~ Austin O'malley

I think part of me doesn't want to remember him, for fear of missing him too much.

~ Francesca Marciano

The memory of the aged becomes clearer and clearer with time. It has no pity.

~ Andrea Camilleri

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.

~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

~ Michel Faber

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

~ Samuel Johnson

I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.

~ Aimee Bender

What has been forgotten.... is never something purely individual.

~ Walter Benjamin

Nothing stays forgotten for long, Elly. Sometimes we simply have to remind the world that we're still here.

~ Sarah Winman

No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

~ Christopher Nolan

Without memory there can be no insight. Without love, there can be no appreciation.

~ Anne Rice

Shame has poor memory.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

~ Wallace Stegner

How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.

~ Lawrence Durrell

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Let her be with her memories. Better that than be aware of this reality.

~ Rosie Thomas

They, like me, like all of us, had, once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, caught by chance a glimpse of an inner essence, only to forget what it was. It was this lost memory that pained us, reduced us to ruins, though still we struggled to be ourselves.

~ Orhan Pamuk

And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint's, it’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania

~ Philip Roth

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

~ Marcel Proust

It was an image Melody would never forget. Or was it the emotions the image conjured - hope, excitement, and fear of the unknown, all three tightly braided together, creating a fourth emotion that was impossible to define. She was getting a second chance at happiness and it tickled like swallowing fifty fuzzy caterpillars.

~ Lisi Harrison

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this simple localization of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of pyschoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.

~ Gaston Bachelard

MISS PRISMMemory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.

~ Oscar Wilde

The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.

~ Herbert Marcuse

Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.

~ Mark Twain

I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.

~ P.d. James

I may be just an empty flesh terminal reliant on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that everything that makes me a unique human being is still out there somewhere, safe in a theoretical storage space owned by giant, multinational corporations.

~ Stephen Colbert

When you can see your life in retrospect, the romanticism of how good things once were gives way to the reality that positives and negatives comprise every day and every decade. (235)

~ Victoria Moran

I can't say why some memories float and other sink.

~ Francesca Marciano

Try to capture what you can't bear to be without

~ Rosie Thomas

To my mind's eye, my buried memories of Brandham Hall are like effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it is only with effort that I see them in terms of colour. There are things I know, though I don't know how I know them, and things that I remember. Certain things are established in my mind as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like the landscape of a dream.

~ L.p. Hartley

The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult loves.

~ Julio Cortázar