Remembering Quotes

I don’t remember his face or the place we ate. I only remember how he grabbed my hand and his voice when he spoke of his dad.

~ Dominic Riccitello

We enshrine things to memory very differently than we experience them in real time. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a couple of terms to make the distinction. He talks about the experiencing self versus the remembering self.

~ Jennifer Senior

One couldn’t be selective when remembering the past. Ignore the turmoil, chaos and pain – and the truly great memories would not shine with such luster.

~ Karen Fowler

I have to live if I want to be remembered.

~ Suzanne Young

When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail--it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name.

~ Chuck Klosterman

Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we've lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something - survived it, experienced it - is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living through something.

~ Carrie Brownstein

What is the one thing that gets you up every morning? The one thing that keeps you going every day, every month, every year? Let me get you started. My one thing is this, ‘I'm one day closer...’ One day closer to a goal, an outcome, or the results I'm after in my life. This is my way of remembering the importance of focusing on the life I desire and living a life of gratitude! So, what’s your one thing…?

~ James A. Murphy

We gonna be a family again in Heaven. It takes some strong patience, but the Lord will come through. And as long as we here, we can get on living by never forgetting. Never forgetting and always remembering.

~ Andrew Galasetti

Words disappear in the air, but writing remains. If you want something to be remembered about you, write it down

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Maybe that was how I found comfort just then, even with him being so far away. By remembering the flavor of his words.

~ Clare Vanderpool

There are edges around the black and every now and then a flash of color streaks out of the gray. But I can never really grasp any of the slivers of memories that emerge.

~ Katie Mcgarry

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

~ Annie Dillard

To forget is to blithely toss aside the hard lessons that were hard won by others before us, thereby needlessly dooming us to endure the hard lessons that are likely to be forgotten by those who will follow us. And it is altogether reasonable that in order to avoid this repetitive trouncing, God graciously granted us memories.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I'm out, surrounded in dark. But in the distance there is a small glow, a tiny light. Suddenly I'm standing alone, the space starting to brighten as the light grows.

~ Suzanne Young

I hope my forgiveness reminds you,Of the part you forgot to break in me.

~ Jenim Dibie

She likes to write messages on balloons and send them to the sky. She takes out a black Magic Marker and she starts writing on the dozen or so balloons, one for each member of our family who died. She doesn't think she can write well and asks me not to read her notes.She likes to think they'll soar all the way to heaven. I think she knows they end up tangled in power lines or deflated in a pile of orange leaves in someone's backyard miles away, but I can never bring myself to say that to her. I've often wondered what they must think, those people who find our balloons. I've wondered if they read the messages and understand what they mean.I remember watching those balloons as a little boy, each fall, wondering if someday I, too, would be nothing but a balloon in the sky, soaring toward the sun until I began to fall slowly back to earth and into the hands of a stranger.

~ Kenny Porpora

I figured we really shouldn’t grieve for those who leave us for God. They’ve arrived at their destinations with lucky souls no longer burdened by our piddling human considerations. It may seem cruel when they die so young or so beautiful or so loved. Cry not for them, for the life not lived. Cry only for your own hurt in missing them. That’s the only true loss. And in those sad moments when you remember a touch, or catch them watching from the corner of your eye, understand they left you with a lesson. Everyone who touches your life teaches you something important you’re meant to learn. Somehow their visit here pushed your own soul along its path. Learning that lesson is the best way you can honor them.

~ Lynnda Pollio

Anything said is gone as soon as it leaves my lips. Things written down at least have a chance to leave a soft echo of what had been.

~ Chris Dietzel

I remember you with my soul clenched in that sadness of mine that you know.

~ Pablo Neruda

When you choose your life, ignore people, when you make it in life, remember some friends, when you sing a song, praise your source, when predicaments arises, stand your ground.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget... So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.

~ Katherine Paterson

People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things - where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance - but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting. I am exhausted from the effort to forget... There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.

~ Stephen Carpenter

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.

~ Frederick Buechner

Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.

~ Anne Rice

A lifetime of memories does not provide empirical proof of the value of living. No one memory has a quantifiable value to anyone expect the holder of the memory. Parenting in large part consists of creating positive memories for children. An accumulation of a lifetime of memories does create a musical score that we can assess from an artistic if not scientific perspective. Each happy memory generates a beat of minor joy that when strung together form the musical notes demarking a person’s prosodic inner tune.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

No person is more ruthlessly cheated than someone strip-mined of his or her ability to recall the vibrancy of the past. After all, what would any person be if robbed of all sense of long-term memory? Without memories, all that any person would know about life is if he or she was hungry or thirsty, cold or hot. Without memories of the past and shredded of any illusion of a future there cannot be a frame for our existence. Without a sense of memory, we lack cognition of the very essence of our being. In absence of our memories, there can be no introspection, no ethical awareness, and no devotion, loyalty, or love.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If you knew you were going to lose your memorybut you could choose five things you’d never forget, what would they be—a certain face, a taste, a scent,a touch; how deepin this, the middle of your life?

~ Kristen Henderson

He could swear he did not look back, could not—by any optical chance, or in any prism—have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture—which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never—consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

There was something brittle about her, and he feared she would snap apart at the slightest touch; she had thrown herself so fiercely into this, the erasing of memory, that it would destroy her.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We want so badly to be happy – to live the kinds of lives that we always hoped we’d live – that we give gifts to ourselves by remembering things not as they were, but as we wish they were.

~ Dathan Auerbach

He's not learning. He's not experiencing. He's remembering.He walks to the next screen, hungry to be himself again.

~ James Dashner

She used to wander through the past as often as it beckoned her, bemoaning the loss of nostalgia. Then, for a while, she turned from it, blissfully free of its noxious clutch, and now it's back, taunting her with what she left behind, knowing she can never recapture what's gone.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

There are photographs of people you don't recognize and photographs of you in ways you don't wish to be remembered, but they each contain elements of places or times you do not wish to forget.

~ Diane Meier

There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ's sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It's all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It's all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries.

~ Harry Leslie Smith

When your heart knows the truth, it never forgets.

~ Shannon L. Alder

He was on her mind but she doesn't let anyone stay for too long.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

But then comes a time when forgetting isn't possible. And I do mean a particular time when no amount of dreaming, not then and maybe not ever, can change how naked and unimportant we become in our own eyes.

~ Stig Dagerman

You grieve at first. And then slowly, with the yawning of the years, the disappeared gets scraped from your memory, the way your flesh can be peeled from your limbs. It's very harsh and extremely painful. But it gets done, square inch-by-square inch. Until, the skin that is your memory gets completely scarred and numbed. You live. The disappeared is detached from the dermis of remembering. And that is what is known as moving on.

~ Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

The air is cold and dusk has descended. In the distance lightning flickers and a far away rumble of thunder awakens my thoughts and makes me remember.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

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