Memory Quotes

The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.

~ George Eliot

The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.

~ Henry Hazlitt

At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (representational processes of memory and narrative) of mental life. The matter of the mind matters for secure attachments.

~ Daniel J. Siegel

At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory.

~ W.g. Sebald

One of my friends at the Compound has a photographic memory. Everything she ever sees, reads, or hears, she remembers forever in perfect detail.

~ Kasie West

Homeopaths argue that water has a memory.

~ Scarlett Thomas

The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.

~ E.m. Forster

We carry our childhood with us.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people

~ Alasdair Gray

People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection.

~ Amitav Ghosh

The mature brain is a time capsule. History resides in its structure.

~ Julian B. Barbour

I'd rather do something than read about it.That's fine, but if you do it, and then can't think what it means, it's never much of a memory. Life has more to so with memories of the past and longings for the future than it ever does with *right now*.-pg 138-9

~ Dean Hughes

Some things I can never forget. I must not. Otherwise what do I have left?

~ Rosie Thomas

I make a rule never to remember anything before last week. It makes life more interesting

~ Jude Morgan

Memories are either the greatest poetry, when they are memories of a vital happiness, or a burning pain, when they touch dried wounds.p. 479

~ Ivan Goncharov

Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.

~ W.g. Sebald

... and then beginning to go back to what you can't even remember.

~ Graham Greene

Again his memory failed to conjure her face. It was like trying to call up a melody while another song played.

~ Laini Taylor

That’s a bit sweeping. Sometimes it takes a while to find out how good or bad something has been.

~ Sophie Page

Only one who loves can remember so well.

~ Anton Chekhov

Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night—little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape wil be quite hidden in the end.

~ C.s. Lewis

Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lost

~ Kevin Arnold

I remember everything about it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent.

~ J. Sheridan Le Fanu

I had been riding horses before my memory kicked in, so my life with horses had no beginning. It simply appeared from the fog of infancy. I survived a difficult childhood by traveling on the backs of horses, and in adulthood the pattern didn't change.

~ Monty Roberts

Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.

~ Anthony Doerr

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

The past informs the present. Memory makes the map we carry, no matter how hard we try to erase it.

~ Cara Black

The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map.

~ Fern Schumer Chapman

Was memory always as much of a burden as it could sometimes be a blessing.

~ Mary Balogh

So one can lose a good ideaby not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asidesit knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiationsare terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and doesrecognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier.

~ John Ashbery

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

~ Siri Hustvedt

What makes and experience a memory is when we share with someone, the emotions we felt

~ Jeremy Aldana

Do you remember those days? Back porch, sunshine, mason jars - she paused at remembered sweetness - we were so foolish then...thinking there was a big ol' world out there to conquer.

~ Melissa Marr

I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place goodbye so regretfully. I have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness, and the memory of it will remain with me always.

~ Mark Twain

Most people, looking back at their childhood, see it as a misty country half-forgotten or only to be remembered through an evocative sound or scent, but some episodes of those short years remain clear and brightly coloured like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

~ D.e. Stevenson

As we age we begin to grasp at youthful bliss like a life raft in a sea of harsh reality.

~ Brad Herzog

It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven...

~ Virginia Woolf

The faces you clutch at desperately slip away; it's when you're not thinking about them that their features flash past. It can happen on a street corner, at the turn of a staircase, because somebody said a word, because some image, an image has passed. Then the face is there for a split second, very fragile. One mustn't grasp at it, or it whisks away. One might as well try and catch a cloud. It was a cloud.

~ François Maspero

In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.

~ Téa Obreht

Anna woke with the wonderful feeling bad sleepers have when they know they have slept well. As if they have stolen something and got away with it. At these times the memories of what led up to such deep sleep keep their distance for a few seconds and those few seconds are perhaps the only time the world can ever be said to show mercy.

~ James Meek