Memory Quotes

Steven Wright

Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.

Christopher Paolini

People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn't.

Vladimir Nabokov

I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes

Roman Payne

She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She
She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water.

Roman Payne

You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in
You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination.

Mark Twain

A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.. Mark Twain
A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.

Roman Payne

I was an adventurer, but she was not an adventuress. She was a 'wanderess.' Thus, she didn’t care about money, only experiences - whether they came from wealth or from poverty, it was all the same to her.

Roman Payne

When she was a child, my love carried a road-map in her hand the way other girls carried handkerchiefs. She always knew the way. Her feet were little wings. And her beautiful head was a compass.

Mark Twain

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.. Mark Twain
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

Harold Pinter

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Few things are more deceptive than memories.. Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Few things are more deceptive than memories.

T.A. Miles

And remember that within every lie, there is a truth hidden. Know the truth to defeat the lie.

George Steiner

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

George Eliot

Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler;
Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.

W.H. Auden

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

Will Self

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.

Paul Auster

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

Jack Kerouac

A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest.
If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.

Gregory Maguire

No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.

Arthur Miller

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

A.E. Van Vogt

You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.

George Gordon Byron

I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch‐light ; and, to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume...

Patricia Hampl

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

Dejan Stojanovic

Since there is no real silence,
Silence will contain all the sounds,
All the words, all the languages,
All knowledge, all memory.

Gilles Deleuze

Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Trying something new is like daring to speak a foreign language, you bite your tongue at
Trying something new is like daring to speak a foreign language, you bite your tongue at first, memorize and thereafter sing it as if you were pretending to be unacquainted.

Daniel J. Rice

When I returned to camp, they walked behind me on the trail, and we spoke not a word about getting skunked today, but rather talked about the days we returned with a stringer full of fish, and how we filleted them and the left the guts out for bears and eagles, and how those fish tasted fresh when we fried them over a fire.

Roger Zelazny

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

Amit Kalantri

Memories make you sentimental, experiences make you smart.

Ram Mohan

Amidst the chaos of the cities, a part of you always yearns for the silence of the woods.

Vera Nazarian

The world is shaped by two things - stories told and the memories they leave behind.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.

Siri Hustvedt

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Somya Kedia

Your words crossed a threshold,
And entered the past,
Yet they have created,
A word that will last.

Aniekee Tochukwu

Let's create a new memory,where our futures will fall back for strength

John Thai

Photography is never real, it’s merely one of many ways of telling the truth.

Leonard Cohen

And I'll dance with you in Vienna,
I'll be wearing a river's disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross.

George Eliot

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined
What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life-to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?

Michael Ondaatje

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

Amy Carmichael

You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.

Jodi Picoult

If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?

Rob Montgomery

The people you love become ghosts inside of you, and like this you keep them alive.

Antonio Porchia

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

Haruki Murakami

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

Julian Barnes

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves.

Cormac McCarthy

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

Jane Austen

...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.

David Eagleman

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

Marilynne Robinson

Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.

Stephen King

I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.

Dante Alighieri

Remember tonight... for it is the beginning of always

M.L. Stedman

Scars are just another kind of memory.

Lucy Grealy

I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try and call on it, just like a light bulb cracking off when you throw the switch.

Garth Stein

Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present. In order to reach any kind of success in automobile racing, a driver must never remember.

Harley King

Memory is a sly devil that pretends to wear the cloak of truth, but deceives us both in our youth and our age.

Julian Barnes

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.

Julian Barnes

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

John Steinbeck

Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age?
Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?

Octavia E. Butler

In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.

Aeschylus

Wisdom comes through suffering.
Trouble, with its memories of pain,
Drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,
So men against their will
Learn to practice moderation.
Favours come to us from gods.

Michael Bassey Johnson

I don't fancy colors of the face, I'm always attracted to colors of the brain.

Terry Pratchett

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.

Ralph Alfred Habas

This is the best possible way to retain important details that you wish to remember in any unified field of knowledge, whether it be the field of economics, science, history, or any other-link them up with related items which you already know or wouldn't mind knowing.

Ruth Ozeki

I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

Rita Mae Brown

One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.

Lois Lowry

Memory is the happiness of being alone.

Jeanette Winterson

Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shift of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.

Audrey Niffenegger

one of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.

Audrey Niffenegger

I sit quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memories standing out.

Jennifer Donnelly

There were times when I lifted my face to the sky, stretched my arms wide to the winter night, and laughed out loud, so happy was I.

The memory of it makes me laugh now, but not from happiness.

Be careful what you show the world.

You never know when the wolf is watching.

Baltasar Gracián

One should cultivate good habits of memory, for it is capable of making existence a Paradise or an Inferno.

Julian Barnes

Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

Audrey Niffenegger

I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room

Roger Zelazny

It is anticipation and recollection that fill the heart - never the sensation of the moment.

Amaka Imani Nkosazana

Take a moment to reflect on your life. If you are not satisfied with your reflection, then make adjustments. It's never too late to live the life of your dreams. Believe in your ability to make it happen.

Lindsay Detwiler

No one can soothe my inner being like you. No one can make me look to the future with such excitement like you did. No one can understand me, fulfill me, fit me like you did." ~Emma Ranstein

Lindsay Detwiler

The feelings that still linger, decade after decade, aren’t just the residue of a love lost. They are as real as the first day I told her I loved her." ~Corbin Jones, Voice of Innocence

Thomas Campbell

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.

Richard Puz

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.
From an Irish headstone

Graham Greene

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she
She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.

Edgar Allan Poe

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!

Robinson Jeffers

I've changed my ways a little, I cannot now
Run with you in the evenings along the shore,
Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment,
You see me there.

Arthur Schnitzler

Oh, we do not understand death, we never understand it; creatures are only truly dead when everyone else has died who knew them.

Gustave Flaubert

How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.

David Eagleman

Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.

Hermann Broch

… for overstrong was the command to hold fast to each smallest particle of time, to the smallest particle of every circumstance, and to embody all of them in memory as if they could be preserved in memory through all deaths for all times.

Dean Koontz

That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on.

Albert Camus

Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.

Rainer Maria Rilke

And when suddenly
the god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry,
uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ –
she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?

Kim Edwards

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love- nothing, now, but bones.

Gabriel García Márquez

Eran gentes de vidas lentas, a las cuales no se les veía volverse viejas, ni enfermarse ni morir, sino que iban desvaneciéndose poco a poco en su tiempo, volviéndose recuerdos, brumas de otra época, hasta que los asimilaba el olvido.

John Irving

Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.

Gail Caldwell

Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.

John Green

Losing you're co-remember meant losing the memory itself.

Gwendolyn Brooks

She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.

William Shakespeare

Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
in this distracted globe. Remember thee?

Catherynne M. Valente

I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?

Peggy Toney Horton

God always provides a pleasant memory to help ease the pain of a bad experience.

W.B. Yeats

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.

Martina Boone

Love doesn't come with an on-off switch. It's made of too many threads of memory and hope and heartache that weave themselves into the very core of who you are.

Harley King

Sometimes memory is the only gift we give ourselves and the only hope we have of finding our way home.

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