Memory Quotes

Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things - landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people - that would otherwise have melted from my memory.

~ David Gentleman

For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.

~ Julian Barnes

It is also true that memory sometimes comes to him as a voice. It is a voice that speaks inside him, and it is not necessarily his own. It speaks to him in the way a voice might tell stories to a child, and yet at times this voice makes fun of him, or calls him to attention, or curses him in no uncertain terms. At times it willfully distorts the story it is telling him, changing the facts to suit its whims, catering to the interests of drama rather than truth. Then he must speak to it in his own voice and tell it to stop, thus returning it to the silence it came from. At other times it sings to him. At still other times it whispers. And then there are the times it merely hums, or babbles, or cries out in pain. And even when it says nothing, he knows it is still there, and in the silence of this voice that says nothing, he waits for it to speak.

~ Paul Auster

Sometimes we live too much in the past,remembering what we wished had happened.

~ Harley King

Only a sentimental being would care about such everyday things—things used and discarded by the humans of their respective eras without thought, yet kept and preserved by an immortal who never forgot them. An immortal who loved and cared for them, dusting them off for an eternity, keeping their dead spirits as alive as he—stuck in their immortal tomb never to find the rest everything must eventually seek. Time had no meaning in this cavern of infinite age.

~ Michelle M. Pillow

Don't we all have a certain number of images that stay around in our head, which we undoubtedly call memories and improperly so, and which we can never get rid of because they return in our sky with the regularity of a comet - torn away also from a world about which we know almost nothing? They return more frequently than comets do, in fact. It would be better, then, to speak of them as loyal satellites, a bit capricious and therefore even troublesome: they appear, disappear, suddenly come back to badger our memory at night when we cannot sleep. But, little as we may care to, as our hearts tell us to, we can also observe them at will, coldly, scrutinize their shadows, colors, and relief. Only, they are dead stars: from them we shall never grasp anything other than the certainty that we have already seen them, examined them, questioned them without really understanding the laws that the line of their mysterious orbits obeyed.

~ Marc Augé

. . . things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them.

~ Denis Johnson

What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

~ Don Delillo

Memory shimmers as a crystal lakethat reflects all things invisible.

~ Harley King

A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life—the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives—as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them. I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.

~ Annie Dillard

Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.

~ Paul Auster

I don't want to be a memory, I want to be a thought

~ Josue Rivera

Memories dancing through ageless ripples of time, waiting to be shared.

~ Al Cash

Some people say it's easy to lie. This may be true for them, but the hard part is remembering the lie because a lie has no memory.

~ Virginia Vayna

The question of what exactly we remember when we listen to old recordings, or whether it can be called remembering at all, becomes less and less answerable over a lifetime.

~ Geoffrey O'brien

It was amazing what I could remember about myself when I retraced my own steps.

~ Cecil Castellucci

Love is inaudible—until you hear it. And once you do, you’ll never forget the sound of her voice.


~ Dark Jar Tin Zoo

Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

~ Haruki Murakami

Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.

~ Sigmund Freud

To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.

~ Marita Golden

I am stone and steel of your sleeping numbers,I remember all you forget.I will die as many timesas you make me over again.

~ Carl Sandburg

We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful.

~ Marc Augé

But you play that passage like it's the -memory- of love. You're so young, yet you know desertion, abandonment. That's why you play that third movement the way you do. Most cellists, they play it with joy. But for you, it's not about joy, it's about the memory of a joyful time that's gone for ever.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

So these things happen, deep in our lives. We do not speak of them. We hide them even from ourselves, but they do not leave us.

~ David Malouf

I suppose that having lost true love once, I never wanted to replace it with a lukewarm approximation that would only serve to make me remember it forever.

~ Paola Kaufmann

All great roads are paved with uncomfortable memories.

~ Amy Neftzger

...dark embers smolder inside me - one touch and they flare - who would have thought memory combustible, or near you bright sparks appear?...

~ John Geddes

My mom used to say that’s why we have memory. And the opposite of memory—hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.

~ Isaac Marion

Well we have to. We have to remember everything. If we don’t, by the time we grow up it’ll be gone forever.

~ Isaac Marion

It is getting dark. In the low mists over the hills, an orange glow broods, as if the trees are on fire. Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly.Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing 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

Memory did not let go; it remained the net dragged in one's wake, with all sorts of strange things snarled in the knotted strands.

~ Steven Erikson

Travel does this: it creates space that allows thoughts and memories to intrude and assert themselves with impunity. Smells and sights, the quality of light, the honk of a horn -- can all act as touchstones when least expected.

~ Andrew Mccarthy

This I have known, and these have come againWith echoing happiness in heart and brain;Time standing still, surrendering to meBeauty that otherwise would cease to be.

~ William Kean Seymour

The kiss stayed there with no place to go, no sensory reserve that could absorb it and file it away as a common act of intimacy, a thousand times received. He knew what Anna was asking: whether you could love someone without habits.

~ Nicole Krauss

Aristotle was convinced that a trained memory helped the development of logical thought processes.

~ Janet M. Tavakoli

Ricci created memory palaces in his mind. Each item in the palace represented a series of concepts. The rooms and locations within the palace served as directories and files, similar to computer data storage. Ricci instantaneously learned, retained and retrieved hundreds of new Chinese kanji, to the astonished delight of Chinese nobles.

~ Janet M. Tavakoli

The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.

~ Nicole Krauss

Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.

~ Pat Conroy

Imagine a society entirely absorbed in its own historicity. It would be incapable of producing historians. Living entirely under the sign of the future, it would satisfy itself with automatic self-recording processes and auto-inventory machines, postponing indefinitely the task of understanding itself

~ Pierre Nora

There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told and what is true.

~ Kevin Powers