Best Quotes About Memories (Top 100)
-
There are too many books I haven't read, too many places I haven't seen, too many memories I haven't kept long enough.
Irwin Shaw
-
It happens to everyone as they grow up. You find out who you are and what you want, and then you realize that people you've known forever don't see things the way you do. So you keep the wonderful memories, but find yourself moving on.
Nicholas Sparks
-
Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.
Guy de Maupassant
-
I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.
Edgar Allan Poe
-
Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.
Mitch Albom
-
It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
John Updike
-
Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted.
Sylvia Plath
-
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
Vladimir Nabokov
-
Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
Kazuo Ishiguro
-
Don't be ashamed to weep; 'tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.
Brian Jacques
-
Humans, not places, make memories.
Ama Ata Aidoo
-
What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.
Cynthia Ozick
-
You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.
Iyanla Vanzant
-
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
William Faulkner
-
Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We're so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.
Haruki Murakami
-
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
Marcel Proust
-
If you want to keep your memories, you first have to live them.
Bob Dylan
-
In memory everything seems to happen to music.
Tennessee Williams
-
Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
Wendell Berry
-
Sometimes you will never know the value of something,until it becomes a memory.
Dr. Seuss
-
I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.
Raymond Carver
-
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
Tim O'Brien
-
Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
Tim O'Brien
-
The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.
Thomas A. Edison
-
There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.
Harold Pinter
-
The heart, like the mind, has a memory. And in it are kept the most precious keepsakes.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
-
The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
Marcel Proust
-
The most significant gifts are the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered throughout our days.
Sue Monk Kidd
-
Although my memory's fading, I remember two things very clearly: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior.
John Newton
-
The most dangerous heart disease: strong memory
Nizar Qabbani
-
True alchemy lies in this formula: âYour memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.
Arthur Rimbaud
-
Values are like fingerprints. Nobody's are the same, but you leave 'em all over everything you do
Elvis Presley
-
The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.
Tennessee Williams
-
I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.
Sophia Loren
-
My memory loves you"側 it asks about you all the time.
Jonathan Carroll
-
Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.
Lewis B. Smedes
-
You will soon discover that in matters of the heart, memories are much kinder than reality
Judith McNaught
-
Good memories are like charms...Each is special. You collect them, one by one, until one day you look back and discover they make a long, colorful bracelet."
James Patterson
-
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
Saul Bellow
-
There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.
Marilynne Robinson
-
Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.
Italo Calvino
-
We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
Cesare Pavese
-
Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.
Steven Wright
-
Today I know that such memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do."
Corrie Ten Boom
-
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
Will Self
-
There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.
Eugene O'Neill
-
To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.
Erich Maria Remarque
-
Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.
Harlan Ellison
-
People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
Edmund Burke
-
There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.
Aeschylus
-
No day shall erase you from the memory of time
Virgil
-
Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.
Amy Bloom
-
Love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the memory of what has happened and the imagining of what is to come.
Anita Shreve
-
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.
Leonard Nimoy
-
Perhaps love is like a resting place, a shelter from the storm. It exists to give you comfort, it is there to keep you warm, and in those times of trouble when you are most alone, the memory of love will bring you home.
John Denver
-
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Joan Didion
-
And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.
Peter Matthiessen
-
Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.
Sholem Asch
-
The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.
Michel Faber
-
But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Thornton Wilder
-
The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We reexperience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.
Augusten Burroughs
-
Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
Oscar Levant
-
Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.
Eudora Welty
-
Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit—some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.
Loren Eiseley
-
You keep your past by having sisters. As you get older, they're the only ones who don't get bored if you talk about your memories.
Deborah Moggach
-
Energy and motion made visible " memories arrested in space
Jackson Pollock
-
It's true, Christmas can feel like a lot of work, particularly for mothers. But when you look back on all the Christmases in your life, you'll find you've created family traditions and lasting memories. Those memories, good and bad, are really what help to keep a family together over the long haul.
Caroline Kennedy
-
The creditor hath a better memory than the debtor.
James Howell
-
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
Gaston Bachelard
-
Friendship is the shadow of the evening, which increases with the setting sun of life.
Jean de La Fontaine
-
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.
Robert M. Pirsig
-
In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior...
Thomas Harris
-
Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.
Brooks Atkinson
-
No more memories, no more silent tears. No more gazing across the wasted years. Help me say goodbye.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
-
I was remembering the things we had done together, the times we had had. It would have been pleasant to preserve that comradeship in the days that came after. Pleasant, but alas, impossible. That which had brought us together had gone, and now our paths diverged, according to our natures and needs. We would meet again, from time to time, but always a little more as strangers; until perhaps at last, as old men with only memories left, we could sit together and try to share them.
John Christopher
-
Growing up is never straight forward.There are moments when everything is fine, and other moments where you realize that there are certain memories that you'll never get back, and certain people that are going to change, and the hardest part is knowing thatthere's nothing you can do except watch them.
Alden Nowlan
-
Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints."
Chief Seattle
-
...the dark ancestral cave, the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back - but...you can't go home again...you can't go...back home to the escapes of Time and Memory. You Can't Go Home Again
Thomas Wolfe
-
Remember on this one thing, said Badger. The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves.
Barry Lopez
-
Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving"¦conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.
John Dewey
-
No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the walls of memory.
Algernon Blackwood
-
The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
Salvador Dali
-
they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine
Lucille Clifton
-
I have memories - but only a fool stores his past in the future.
David Gerrold
-
For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it's a pity we use it so little.
Rachel Carson
-
How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks.
Benjamin Zander
-
Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose
Kevin Arnold
-
When our memories outweigh our dreams, we have grown old.
Bill Clinton
-
The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.
Louis Armstrong
-
The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.
Howard Pyle
-
When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.
Max Frisch
-
My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering.
Joy Harjo
-
What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?' 'History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly. 'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. ... 'Finn?' '"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." (quoting Patrick Lagrange)
Julian Barnes
-
A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works.
William Morris
-
The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember
Harold Pinter
-
There are three signs of old age: loss of memory ... I forget the other two.
Red Skelton
-
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows, My friends forsake me like a memory lost; I am the self-consumer of my woes, They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost; And yet I am, and live with shadows tost.
John Clare
-
The hunger and thirst for knowledge, the keen delight in the chase, the good humored willingness to admit that the scent was false, the eager desire to get on with the work, the cheerful resolution to go back and begin again, the broad good sense, the unaffected modesty, the imperturbable temper, the gratitude for any little help that was given - all these will remain in my memory though I cannot paint them for others.
Frederic William Maitland
-
A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.
Grandma Moses
-
We walked for some time, and grew to know each other, as best as we'd allow. These are some of the high points. They lack continuity. I don't apologize. I merely pointed it out, adding with some truth, I feel, that most liaisons lack continuity. We find ourselves in odd places at various times, and for a brief span we link our lives to others and then, our time elapsed, we move apart. Through a haze of pain occasionally, usually through a veil of memory that clings, then passes, sometimes as though we have never touched.
Harlan Ellison
Even More Memories Quotes
-
Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this simple localization of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of pyschoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.
Gaston Bachelard
-
We walked for some time, and grew to know each other, as best as we'd allow. These are some of the high points. They lack continuity. I don't apologize. I merely pointed it out, adding with some truth, I feel, that most liaisons lack continuity. We find ourselves in odd places at various times, and for a brief span we link our lives to others and then, our time elapsed, we move apart. Through a haze of pain occasionally, usually through a veil of memory that clings, then passes, sometimes as though we have never touched.
Harlan Ellison
-
It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.
Edgar Degas
-
A very beautiful woman hardly ever leaves a clear-cut impression of features and shape in the memory: usually there remains only an aura of living color
William Bolitho
-
You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.
E. L. Doctorow
-
There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.
James Branch Cabell
-
We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient—- it's not useful—- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.
Julian Barnes
-
Memory, of all the powers of the mind, is the most delicate and frail.
Ben Jonson
-
Yeah, a memory's never finished, if you really think about it.
Richard Linklater
-
By showing hunger, deprivation, starvation and brutality, as well as endurance and nobility, documentaries inform, prod our memories, even stir us to action. Such films do battle for our very soul.
Theodore Bikel
-
I remember the difficulty we had in the beginning replacing magnetic cores in memories and eventually we had both cost and performance advantages. But it wasn't at all clear in the beginning.
Gordon Moore
-
I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory.
Andre Breton
-
We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.
Georges Duhamel
-
That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically."
Joseph Roth
-
An imagination is a powerful tool. It can tint memories of the past, shade perceptions of the present, or paint a future so vivid that it can entice... or terrify, all depending upon how we conduct ourselves today.
Jim Davis
-
And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
John Irving
-
She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.
Frank Deford
-
Not only during the ascent, but also during the descent my willpower is dulled. The longer I climb the less important the goal
seems to me, the more indifferent I become to myself. My attention
has diminished, my memory is weakened. My mental fatigue is now
greater than the bodily. It is so pleasant to sit doing nothing - and therefore so dangerous. Death through exhaustion is like death
through freezing - a pleasant one.
Reinhold Messner
-
Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
Will Durant
-
Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past.
Richard Linklater
-
The Lord's Prayer may be committed to memory quickly, but it is slowly learnt by heart.
Frederick Denison Maurice
-
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.
Don DeLillo
-
There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance.
Gilbert Parker
-
The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.
Tim O'Brien
-
The repressed memory is like a noisy intruder being thrown out of the concert hall. You can throw him out, but he will bang on the door and continue to disturb the concert. The analyst opens the door and says, If you promise to behave yourself, you can come back in.
Theodor Reik
-
Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.
Alice Meynell
-
My grandmothers are full of memories, smelling of soap and onions and wet clay, with veins rolling roughly over quick hands, they have many clean words to say, my grandmothers were strong.
Margaret Walker
-
Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.
Don DeLillo
-
I do not know what you are supposed to do with memories likes these. It feels wrong to want to forget. Perhaps this is why we write these things down, so we can move on.
Lloyd Jones
-
When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.
Julian Barnes
-
Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory.
James Stephens
-
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined - to strengthen each other - to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.
George Eliot
-
A mother's nurturing love arouses in children, from their earliest days on earth, an awakening of the memories of love and goodness they experience in their premortal existence, Because our mothers love us, we learn, or more accurately remember, that God also loves us
M. Russell Ballard
-
Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing their colored clothes; caps and bells. And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng's clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, 0 Lord, Creator, Hallowed one, You still, hour by hour sustain it.
Denise Levertov
-
Do not trust your memory; it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip through it.
Georges Duhamel
-
I acknowledge the privilege of being alive in a human body at this moment, endowed with senses, memories, emotions, thoughts, and the space of mind in its wisdom aspect.
Alex Grey
-
To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.
Albert Finney
-
He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
Edith Wharton
-
A liar should have a good memory.
Quintilian
-
For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.
Richard K. Morgan
-
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
E. M. Forster
-
...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.
Jamaica Kincaid
-
Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on a significant bases of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.
August Strindberg
-
We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.
Edwin Markham
-
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Joan Didion
-
So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.
Helen Keller
-
To know is not too demanding: it merely requires memory and time. But to understand is quite a different matter: it requires intellectual ability and training, a self conscious awareness of what one is doing, experience in techniques of analysis and synthesis, and above all, perspective.
Carroll Quigley
-
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
Adrienne Rich
-
Soon or late, every dog's master's memory becomes a graveyard; peopled by wistful little furry ghosts that creep back unbidden, at times, to a semblance of their olden lives.
Albert Payson Terhune
-
The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Billy Collins
-
The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.
Augusto Roa Bastos
-
Don't go to eighth grade...don't talk about something old...don't bring up old memories that have nothing to do with who we are now. THIS is all that matters! TODAY.
Brad Meltzer
-
Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
George William Curtis
-
Curiosity is as much the parent of attention, as attention is of memory.
Richard Whately
-
As you get older three things happen. The first is your memory goes, and I can't remember the other two.
Norman Wisdom
-
Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.
Jim Bishop
-
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
Jorge Luis Borges
-
It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
Lewis Carroll
-
Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.
Franklin P. Adams
-
Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become.
Leo Szilard
-
Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.
Primo Levi
-
Someone knocks at the door of an apartment to borrow salt or sugar, people run into each other in the elevator, and in this way become inscribed in the spectator's memory.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
-
No matter how far we travel, the memories will follow in the baggage car.
August Strindberg
-
It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.
David Brooks
-
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
Margaret Walker
-
Memories are hunting horns whose sound dies on the wind.
Guillaume Apollinaire
-
If you're lucky enough to fall in love, that's one thing. Otherwise all that was ever truly beautiful to me was boyhood. It's the meal we sup on for the rest of our lives. Love puts the icing on life. But if you don't find it...you must call on your childhood memories over and over till you do.
Leon Uris
-
Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back on them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them.
Robert Southey
-
Trees for example, carry the memory of rainfal. In their rings we read ancient weather - storms, sunlight and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.
Anne Michaels
-
Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.
Jean Genet
-
A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
Clifton Fadiman
-
We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.
Jeremy Irons
-
Memories, important yesterdays, were once todays. Treasure and notice today.
Gloria Gaither
-
Vengeance is having a videotape planted in your soul that cannot be turned off. It plays the painful scene over and over again inside your mind...And each time it plays you feel the clap of pain again...Forgiving turns off the videotape of pained memory Forgiving sets you free.
Lewis B. Smedes
-
I have a remarkable memory; I forget everything. It is wonderfully convenient. It is as though the world were constantly renewing itself for me.
Jules Renard
-
Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.
Lionel Shriver
-
And I never started to plow in my life That some one did not stop in the road And take me away to a dance or picnic. I ended up with forty acres; I ended up with a broken fiddleâ And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories, And not a single regret.
Edgar Lee Masters
-
Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to "relive" or "reenact" them, especially if they were traumatic. (229-230)
Norman Doidge
-
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
Cyril Connolly
-
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Galway Kinnell
-
Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.
Harold Bloom
-
Good days are to be gathered like grapes, to be trodden and bottled into wine and kept for age to sip at ease beside the fire. If the traveler has vintaged well, he need trouble to wander no longer; the ruby moments glow in his glass at will.
Freya Stark
-
The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
Cesare Pavese
-
I have terrible short-term memory loss, which I like to think of as Presidential eligibility.
Paula Poundstone
-
We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.
Anthony Doerr
-
Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.
Antoine Rivarol
-
I hid my love when young till I
Couldn't bear the buzzing of a fly;
I hid my life to my despite
Till I could not bear to look at light:
I dare not gaze upon her face
But left her memory in each place;
Where'er I saw a wild flower lie
I kissed and bade my love good-bye.
John Clare
-
God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
James M. Barrie
-
Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr
-
The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.
Philip Gourevitch
-
Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.
Isabel Allende
-
If I have done any deed worthy of remembrance, that deed will be my monument. If not, no monument can preserve my memory.
Agesilaus II
-
In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.
David Leavitt
-
Memories of our lives, of our works and our deeds will continue in others.
Rosa Parks
-
I've always seen myself as one of those 'show people.' My earliest memories are wanting and needing to entertain people, like a gypsy traveler who goes from place to place, city to city, performing for audiences and reaching people.
Brittany Murphy
-
The heart of marriage is memories; and if the two of you happen to have the same ones and can savor your reruns, then your marriage is a gift from the gods.
Bill Cosby
-
San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.
Jack London
-
In our memories, there is a graveyard where we bury our dead. They all lie there together, the loved ones and the ones we hated, friends and foes and kin, with no distinction among them. We have to mourn every one of them, because our memories have made them as much a part of us as our bones or our skin. If we don't, we've no right to remember anything at all.
Steven Brust
-
The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.
James Carroll
-
A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.
Samuel Butler
-
Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of [my husband] and me. Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me.
Marge Piercy
-
Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.
Gilbert Parker
-
And it sort of jogged a memory of something that I read at school and I read it, and I thought God this is it. So you never can tell. I could find something this afternoon.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
-
Memories assailed him of how gently she had spoken, touched, and moved; of how she'd loved him fiercely despite his mistakes and obsessions and weaknesses. And the conviction descended on him that love like theirs couldn't possibly suffer any change.
Denis Johnson
-
Liars need to have good memories.
Algernon Sidney
-
Victory is everything. You can spend the money but you can never spend the memories.
Ken Venturi
-
In education it isn't how much you have committed to memory or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know and it's knowing how to use the information you get.
William Feather
-
Line by line, moment by moment, special times are etched into our memories in the permanent ink of everlasting love in our relationships.
Gloria Gaither
-
What peaceful hours I once enjoy'd! How sweet their memory still! But they have left an aching void The world can never fill.
William Cowper
-
I know everything, you see,' the old voice wheedled. 'The beginning, the present, the end. Everything. You now, you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher faculties than memory and perception. But dragons, my boy, have a whole different kind of mind.' He stretched his mouth in a kind of smile, no trace of pleasure in it. 'We are from the mountaintop: all time, all space. We see in one instant the passionate vision and the blowout.
John Gardner
-
Everybody gets a tag. If you listen to a Velvet Underground record, you don't think, 'Godfathers of Punk.' You just think, 'This sounds great.' The tags are there in order to help try to sell something by giving it a name that's going to stick in somebody's memory. But it doesn't describe it. So 'depressing' isn't a word I would use to describe my music. But there is some sadness in it — there has to be, so that the happiness in it will matter.
Elliott Smith
-
What if I left my memory in the future and I have to catch up to it?
Warren Ellis
-
Christmas is a bridge. We need bridges as the river of time flows past. Today's Christmas should mean creating happy hours for tomorrow and reliving those of yesterday.
Gladys Taber
-
So often we rob tomorrow's memories by today's economies.
John Mason Brown
-
All finite things reveal infinitude: The mountain with its singular bright shade Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow, The after-light upon ice-burdened pines; Odor of basswood upon a mountain slope, A scene beloved of bees; Silence of water above a sunken tree: The pure serene of memory of one man,- A ripple widening from a single stone Winding around the waters of the world.
Theodore Roethke
-
I have always had a love for American geography, and especially for the landscapes of the South. One of my pleasures has been to drive across it, with no one in the world knowing where I am, languidly absorbing the thoughts and memories of old moments, of people vanished now from my life.
Willie Morris
-
I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.
Diane Sawyer
-
Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
Alan Bennett
-
Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.
Lord Dunsany
-
In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.
Wade Davis
-
Memory changes as a person matures.
Siri Hustvedt
-
To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.
Thomas Campbell
-
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
Siri Hustvedt
-
Aren't memories just dreams we have when we're awake?
Ze Frank
-
[M]ost people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because they're in the past doesn't mean you can't treasure the possibilities ... maybe we put down a marker for another time. And now's the time. Now we can do whatever we want to do.
James Robertson
-
To be homeward bound, no matter what tragic memories you have harbored, is unlike any voyage a man can ever make.
Leon Uris
-
Memory is a barricade against forgetting; light is a bulwark against darkness; life is a flex against the stillness of the grave. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here, clear a space in all the debris, through all the anxieties and worries, where I can just exist, easily and simply, entire, for as long as I have left.
Helen Humphreys
-
The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.
Siri Hustvedt
-
The glorious memory of brave men is continually renewed; the fame of those who have performed any noble deed is never allowed to die; and the renown of those who have done good service to their country becomes a matter of common knowledge to the multitude, and part of the heritage of posterity.
Polybius
-
In my defence I can only say that her past, too, like mine, like everyone's in fact, was a locked box. Occasionally we allow people a peep, but generally only at the top level. The darker streams of our memories we negotiate alone.
Julian Fellowes
-
Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come of nothing.
Joshua Reynolds
-
As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.
John Lancaster Spalding
-
Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.
William Trevor
-
We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.
Frank McCourt
-
A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.
Fawn M. Brodie
-
I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is in my heart and mind and memories.
Maya Angelou
-
The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.
George Steiner
-
History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
-
We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things....but, there are times when we must stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or in its memory. We listen, and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.
James Carroll
-
Friends depart, and memory takes them To her caverns, pure and deep.
Thomas Haynes Bayly
-
If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn't hassle a browser – and steal the contents of books by reading them. I drank down 1984 while loitering in the 'O' section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping vessel of my attention carefully out of the shop.
Francis Spufford
-
One learns little more about a man from his feats of literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.
Frank Moore Colby
-
Put it out of your mind. In no time, it will be a forgotten memory.
Samuel Goldwyn
-
Tell me the tales that to me were so dear, Long, long ago, long, long ago.
Thomas Haynes Bayly
-
I don't know anyone who's going to see Grind 22 times in the theater. My mom. Some kid who has short-term memory loss and forgot that he's seen it.
Adam Brody
-
Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.
James Carroll
-
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.
Graham Swift
-
The memory of the American public is about six weeks.
F. Lee Bailey
-
Time heals nothing, it merely rearranges our memory.
Gary Numan
-
A person without a memory is either a child or an amnesiac. A country without a memory is neither a child nor an amnesiac, but neither is it a country.
Mary Astor
-
Anyone who limits her vision to memories of yesterday is already dead.
Lillie Langtry
-
His nerve, his memory, and I can't remember the third thing.
Lee Trevino
-
We can never fully repay the debt of our proud nation to those who have laid down their lives for our country. The best we can do is honor their memory, ensure that their sacrifice is not in vain, and help provide for their families.
Susan Collins
-
What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what's behind them.
Augusto Roa Bastos
-
Each minute bursts in the burning room,The great globe reels in the solar fire,Spinning the trivial and unique away.(How all things flash! How all things flare!)What am I now that I was then?May memory restore again and againThe smallest color of the smallest day:Time is the school in which we learn,Time is the fire in which we burn.
Delmore Schwartz
-
The Right Honourable Gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
-
The bitterness of poor quality is remembered long after the sweetness of low price has faded from memory.
Aldo Gucci
-
Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.
Margaret Drabble
-
I say that I can't make anything up. I think of myself as a collage artist. I'm cutting and pasting memories of my life. And I say, I have to live a life in order to tell a life. I would prefer to tell it because telling you're always in control, you're like God.
Spalding Gray
-
To make a man happy, fill his hands with work, his heart with affection, his mind with purpose, his memory with useful knowledge, his future with hope, and his stomach with food.
Frederick E. Crane
-
Smell brings to mind... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.
Diane Ackerman
-
When I putt, my emotions collide like tectonic plates. It's left my memory circuits full of scars that won't heal.
Mac O'Grady
-
A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.
Carol Shields
-
Grief is only the memory of widowed affections.
James Martineau
-
The three indispensable of genius are: understanding, feeling, and perseverance; the three things that enrich genius are: contentment of mind, the cherishing of good thoughts, and the exercise of memory
Robert Southey
-
Man is the only creature whose emotions are entangled with his memory.
Marjorie Holmes
-
The fifties are a peaceful time, a quiet sleeping time between two noisy bursts of years, a blue and white time filled with sweet yellow days, music and bright smelling memories.
David Gerrold
-
The selective memory isn't selective enough.
Blake Morrison
-
A land without ruins is a land without memories - a land without memories is a land without history.
Abram Joseph Ryan
-
The issues and challenges surrounding nuclear non-proliferation are continuously evolving. Theyve changed dramatically at several junctures in recent memory.
Spencer Abraham
-
The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.
Charles Wright
-
I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.
Thomas Mallon
-
Another one of the old poets, whose name has escaped my memory at present, called Truth the daughter of Time.
Aulus Gellius
-
Memory is the best of all gardens. Therein, winter and summer, the seeds of their past lie dormant, ready to spring into instant bloom at any moment the mind wishes to bring them to life.
Hal Boyle
-
Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.
Patricia Hampl
-
Even God cannot change the past.
Agathon
-
I don't really see the hurdles. I sense them like a memory.
Edwin Moses
-
I drink to stay warm, and to kill selected memories
Conor Oberst
-
I'm afraid that the United States is more isolated today than at any other time in my memory.
Brent Scowcroft
-
So if it seems that some of what I'll have to say in the pages to come doesn't reflect the mellowing of age, that's only because I've never found that life and memories respond to time the way that tobacco does.
Caleb Carr
-
You can reconstruct the picture from chaos and memory's ruins.
Kay Boyle
-
How we remember, what we remember, and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality.
Christina Baldwin
-
I'd rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots.
Edmund White
-
I review all I know, but can synthesize no meaning. When I doze, the Fact, the certain accomplished calamity, wakes me roughly like a brutal nurse. I see it crouching inflexibly in a corner of the ceiling. It comes down in geometrical diagonal like lightning.It says, I remain, I AM, I shall never cease to be: your memory will grow a deathly glaze: you will forget, you will fade out, but I cannot be undone.Thus every quarter hour it puts the taste of death in my mouth, and shows me, but not gently, how I go whoring after oblivion.
Elizabeth Smart
-
Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience.
Samuel Alexander
-
A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.
Alexander Smith
-
Escape the safety of the small by taking the risks to become part of something bigger. Your true self demands it. Listen for the timer on the oven to sound-that's when the memory curtain parts, flashing moments that really mattered.
Kirby Wright
-
I was once married to a woman who could eat anything and tell you what was in it: the most complicated recipes. Her memory of taste - now that's what I call memory!
Morton Feldman
-
In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
Virginia Woolf
-
A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.
Hortense Calisher
-
Sixty years after the end of the war, the time has come to make this information available. With the number of survivors and witnesses diminishing by the day, and the reality that the Holocaust is fading into the pages of history and memory, we should not have to wait any longer.
Abraham Foxman
-
Money can't buy happiness, but it will certainly get you a better class of memories.
Ronald Reagan
-
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike
-
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.
Susan Sontag
-
Now those memories come back to haunt me they haunt me like a curse.
Bruce Springsteen
-
History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.
Stephen Spender
-
Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.
Diane Ackerman
-
The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.
John Still
-
Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures.
Morton Feldman
-
Creditors have better memories than debtors.
Benjamin Franklin
-
Looking forward into an empty year strikes one with a certain awe, because one finds therein no recognition. The years behind have a friendly aspect, and they are warmed by the fires we have kindled, and all their echoes are the echoes of our own voices.
Alexander Smith