Memory Quotes

The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don't want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.

~ Haruki Murakami

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.

~ Rebecca Solnit

The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.

~ Marcel Proust

But sometimes the memories feel so real, so visceral, so personal, that I confuse them with my own.

~ Gayle Forman

I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the house where I grew up even though I have not been inside it for decades . . . I want to be able to walk through the house of my own life until my life is done. I want to hold on to who and what I have been even as both become somehow inevitably less.

~ Anna Quindlen

Though you forget the way to the Temple,There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not. You shall not deny the Stranger.

~ T.s. Eliot

As dye soaks fibres, drawn into them to change their colour forever, so does a memory, stinging or sweet, change the fibre of a man’s character.

~ Robin Hobb

Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits.

~ Frederick Buechner

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.p. 428

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

...no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.

~ Catherine Lacey

If you want to draw some advantage from your history, you must accept not only this miracle but also many others. In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out of loneliness receive caring teachers who are really the children themselves moved back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding lights to it to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut.

~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?

~ Tan Twan Eng

More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

If there's one thing I've still got, it's my memory. Which is too bad. Maybe if I forgot things once in a while, we'd all be a little bit happier.

~ Jay Asher

Tigana, let my memory ofyou be like a blade in mysoul.

~ Guy Gavriel Kay

Three scents accompany my memories of this place: cut wood, poppy-seed bread, and the soft, crisp smell of snow.

~ Elif Shafak

We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us ... we are doing the work of memory.

~ Patricia Hampl

the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings

~ Pittacus Lore

Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.

~ Audrey Niffenegger

...infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyse mechanisms of which otherwise we should know nothing. A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to the study of the phenomena of memory.

~ Marcel Proust

When a memory fails to appear, it seems as though the time when it was created did not really exist, and maybe that is true. Time itself is nothing; only the experience of it is something. When that dies, it assumes the form of a denial, the symbol of mortality, what you have already lost before you lose everything. When his friend had said something similar to his father, his response had been, If you had to retain everything, you’d explode. There’s simply not enough space for it all. Forgetting is like medicine; you have to take it at the right time.

~ Cees Nooteboom

Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order o make sense of the world around us?

~ Twang Eng Tan

In a sense, the recording stylus and its reverse component have defeated time. Up until a little more than a generation ago, the sound of a word once uttered, a violin note once played, were possible treasures dropped into the none too safe repository of human memory; but the same sounds transferred to a wax or plastic or film or wire can live and vibrate again fifteen minutes or fifty years from now.

~ Judith C. Waller

You cannot build a complete memory with a single memory tool any more than you can build a complete building with a single carpentry tool.

~ Kenneth L. Higbee

There is a hopeless longing for nostalgia that pervades the human soul, a return to the warm glow of remembrance or some imagined past.

~ Deborah L. Norris

For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.

~ Marcel Proust

As Mary Grannon, the beloved Mary of The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Just Mary’ hour says:So many parents are clinging to some favorite story in their own youth and measuring all children's material by it—forgetting what the last minstrel found out in his travels, that 'old times are changed, old manners gone, a stranger fills the Stuart's throne.' Let's not be like the bigots of the iron time; let's be rooters for the modern.

~ Judith C. Waller

What have I kept of Rae Evans from the moment when she half stood behind her desk and held out her hand to shake mine? I think it is the impression of white--white face, white shirt between two halves of a power dark suit. Hers were night colors, and though it was early in the morning, and she was my new boss, it seemed as though the business day had not quite caught up to us, and maybe never would.

~ Dorothy Johnston

...fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone, we're left with the concept, but not the true memory--why else...would anyone give birth more than once?

~ Téa Obreht

Rosemary was unaccustomed to worrying about what people thought of her memories. She certainly did not judge others on theirs. In a society that circulated memories as currency, such judgment was considered the height of prudishness. 

~ Octavia Cade

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.

~ Anne Michaels

Put out my eyes, and I can see you still;slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;and without any feet can go to you;and tongueless, I can conjure you at will.Break off my arms, I shall take hold of youand grasp you with my heart as with a hand;arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;and if you set this brain of mine afire,upon my blood I then will carry you.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

~ Joshua Foer

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

~ Haruki Murakami

These were the moments that would stick in her memory for years to come, those instants of perfect bliss that nothing else would ever match again.

~ Francesca Marciano

Memories are not always the best measure of things.

~ Amy Neftzger

Memory is the 'filling cabinet' of the brain wherein is stored all thought impulses, all conscious experiences, and all sensations which reach the brain through the five physical senses.

~ Napoleon Hill

I wished, more than anything, to forget. But what I had, more than anything, was time to remember.

~ Ann Somerville

Our experi¬ences and our memories are within us, and the key is to be aware of the lens or the filter, to realise that we can also change the angle, especially when we are feeling agitated or stuck in life, that we can change the record.

~ Gyalwa Dokhampa

He knew perfectly well (even if he wasn’t inclined to admit it) that the material body had a spiritual aspect. He knew that “spirit,” however explained, was real, because of his own undeniable experiences—which, though he might suppress them, he couldn’t altogether erase from memory.

~ Sol Luckman