Memory Quotes

Are we not, all of us, in some way, damaged mirrors? Are we not constantly engaged in focusing the light of thought—memories out of the depths of human experience—onto the photographic plate of each moment? The image captured in this instant is a snapshot of all eternity, subtly altered by our own brokenness. And who’s to say that the image formed by a damaged mirror is not a truer picture of the universe?

~ Yael Shahar

Only with steadfast memories can we now be strong so as to undo the mistakes of the past, to begin anew and build from the rubble of their betrayal...

~ F. Sionil José

I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing—as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it’s the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence.

~ Sol Luckman

Memories are powerful that way. They can bring a person back to another place and time and make them laugh or cry all over again.

~ Shannon Wiersbitzky

Our experiences 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

It's all right, Ginny. It's over. It's just a memory.

~ J.k. Rowling

But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising.

~ Emily Dickinson

The only way to truly record a person is not in words, not in still frames, but in bone and skin and memory.

~ Victoria Schwab

The gates of memory would roll open—old joys would stretch out their arms to them, old hopes and dreams would call to them, and they would stir beneath the burden that lay upon them, and feel its forever immeasurable weight. They could not even cry out beneath it; but anguish would seize them, more dreadful than the agony of death.

~ Upton Sinclair

People with dissociative disorders are like actors trapped in a variety of roles. They have difficulty integrating their memories, their sense of identity and aspects of their consciousness into a continuous whole. They find many parts of their experience alien, as if belonging to someone else. They cannot remember or make sense of parts of their past.

~ David Speigel

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.

~ Gaston Bachelard

A lover of comfort might shrug after looking at the whole apparent jumble of furniture, old paintings, statues with missing arms and legs, engravings that were sometimes bad but precious in memory, and bric-a-brac. Only the eye of a connoisseur would have blazed with eagerness at the sight of this painting or that, some book yellowed with age, a piece of old porcelain, or stones and coins.But the furniture and paintings of different ages, the bric-a-brac that meant nothing to anyone but had been marked for them both by a happy hour or memorable moment, and the ocean of books and sheet music breathed a warm life that oddly stimulated the mind and aesthetic sense. Present everywhere was vigilant thought. The beauty of human effort shone here, just as the eternal beauty of nature shone all around.pp. 492-493

~ Ivan Goncharov

Here's what I think: when you're born, you're assigned a brain like you're assigned a desk, a nice desk, with plenty of pigeonholes and drawers and secret compartments. At the start, it's empty, and then you spend your life filling it up. You're the only one who understands the filing system, you amass some clutter, sure, but somehow it works: you're asked the capital of Oregon, and you say Salem; you want to remember your first-grade teacher's name, and there it is, Miss Fox. Then suddenly you're old, and though everything's still in your brain, it's crammed so tight that when you try to remember the name of the guy who does the upkeep on your lawn, your first childhood crush comes fluttering out, or the persistent smell of tomato soup in a certain Des Moines neighborhood.

~ Elizabeth Mccracken

He was stabbed by memory, that tyrant which impinges upon our dreams and leaps at out throat as soon as we awaken.

~ Françoise Sagan

I wanted a life of adventure. I wanted to travel. I wanted to work my way up to being Somebody. I wanted to leave a mark on the Earth and be remembered.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Forgiveness is an attribute we must practice , as we all want the Al-mighty to forgive us. But forgetting and trusting again with a revivifying attitude is undoubtedly stark exhausting . We have a wonderful memory like a nostalgic alarm which hurdles us in bandaging the heart and mind just like a new one.

~ Aisha Raheel

This is a story, told the way you say stories should be told: Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country. This, of course, is the barest outline, and futile to discuss. It’s as pointless as throwing birdseed on the ground while snow still falls fast. Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up: the black shroud over the pool. Love, in its shortest form, becomes a word. What I remember about all that time is one winter. The snow. Even now, saying “snow,” my lips move so that they kiss air. No mention has been made of the snowplow that seemed always to be there, scraping snow off our narrow road — an artery cleared, though neither of us could have said where the heart was.

~ Ann Beattie

One day all the memories die , Be patient ...

~ Arash Pakravesh

I would have no need for the Memory Of Things past if those which were Present were more agreeable

~ Peter Ackroyd

Inconstancy of every second punishes me.The wind, the rain, the clouds, the days,I try to grasp the hours but they banish me,And I remain in the vortex of incongruity.The lone coyote shrieks,Startling my soul into wakefulness.The Cacti bloom and the Wren beckons,Deepening my mind into dreamlessness.And the moments spend time with inconstancy,increasing the ease of uneasiness.Why this daily pilgrimage of ideas?When no saint has ever ceased the day!Still yearning for some magic hour,Where nothing but permanence dwells.Alas, only this thought be the only truth,That certainty in death is constant.And so, in every second, minute, hour,our only gain is memory.Be it bitter or sweet:it is ours!Rejoice.

~ Ansul Noor

Why could this darkness rip the gloominess around meHad an unknown reason of being fearful for so longThinking, if its touched by these horrendous windsWill unleash my sorrowful side & my mood swings!Aesthetically pleasing it is now, Couldn't yearn for it to be any betterThis oasis of serenity though, I trust will cast away all my darkness & dust!

~ Shumila Shah

Tomorrow is a memory best forgotten.

~ Harley King

Memory in the mind of man can adapt to the worst conditions. I'll give you an example, an analogy of sorts: Each night I sop rags with beer and lay them out in careful strips. With rags soaked in beer I tease cockroaches from a crack in the baseboard. By morning they're good and drunk and I pop them into a baggy, then take them outside and throw the little buggers away.

~ Bob Thurber

Like her father, Bess never forgot a hurt or a service.

~ Jeane Westin

Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.

~ Rabih Alameddine

Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.

~ Elena Ferrante

Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

She smiles, and her eyes look as if they can see back into her memory, into all the things that have gone into making a person what they are.

~ Lois Lowry

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning -- it'll be

~ Mary Oliver

These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.

~ Virginia Woolf

And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building.I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.

~ Fernando Pessoa

I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments.

~ Julian Barnes

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final s

~ Alice Munro

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

~ E.m. Forster

And anyway, the anticipation was always worse than the thing itself - the anticipation and the memory, of course. And the anticipation of the memory was maybe the worst part of all.

~ Jennifer Dubois

Perhaps memory is a thing that everyone involved has to work at, like stitching up a big quilt out of everything that ever happened to you.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

He moved on down the alley, his feet walking forward and his brain swimming backward through a sea of time. It was a dark sea, much darker than the alley. The tide was slow and there were no waves, just tiny ripples that murmured very softly. Telling him about yesterday. Telling him that yesterday could never really be discarded, it was always a part of now. There was just no way to get rid of it. No way to push it aside or throw it into an ash can, or dig a hole and bury it. For all buried memories were nothing more than slow-motion boomerangs, taking their own sweet time to come back. This one had taken seven years.

~ David Goodis

Ladies and gentlemen, when you paint your lips, eyes, nails, hair, side-beards, or whatever, to look beautiful or handsome, don't forget your up stairs, if you don't go up there to put things in order, then, consider the former attributes null and void.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Each loved one went silently down,bubbles bursting leaving behindimages they heldto stick on the glass of memory.

~ Dr. Prathap Kamath Elegy

Like her father, Bess never forgot a hurt of a service.

~ Jeane Westin