Memory Quotes

Quotes About Memory From Million Quotes

 

My dear, dear Friend... in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart...
- William Wordsworth, lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 1798 July 13th


Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose. - From the television show The Wonder Years


A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. - Edward de Bono


Every man's memory is his private literature. - Aldous Huxley


You remember someone said that God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.... - J.M. Barrie, "Courage" (The Rectorial Address Delivered at St. Andrews University, 1922 May 3rd)


We each need to make peace with our own memories. We have all done things that make us flinch. - Surya Das


Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food. - Austin O'Malley


Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things. - Pierce Harris, Atlanta Journal


We do not remember days; we remember moments. - Cesare Pavese, The Burning Brand


There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory. - Josh Billings


Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us. - Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest"


It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life. - P.D. James


Years fold their mantles
Round those dead blisses...
- J.J. Britton (1832–1913), "Long Ago"


And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses — would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? - Rainer Maria Rilke


The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume. - Jean de Boufflers


I have memories — but only a fool stores his past in the future. - David Gerrold


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, Queenie, 1971


Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. - Saul Bellow


Memory itself is an internal rumor. - George Santayana, The Life of Reason





A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction. - Carol Shields


It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment — but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer? - Lord Byron


The past is never dead, it is not even past. - William Faulkner




Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart. - Thomas Fuller


Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
- T.S. Eliot


With most men, scarce a link of memory holds yesterday and to-day together. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims, "Inspiration"


What we remember from childhood we remember forever — permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. - Cynthia Ozick


Memory is what tells a man that his wife's birthday was yesterday. - Mario Rocco


Tonight, as I looked out my window
At the snowflakes, lovely and white,
I thought of the days of my girlhood
Long past, all so happy and bright!
- Gertrude Tooley Buckingham, "The First Snow of the Season" (1940s)


Living in memories is an empty gesture. - Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh


All our lives we are engaged in preserving our experiences and keeping them fresh by artificially sprinkling the water of memory over them. They have ceased to retain their original smell and fragrance. Do you call it life— this effort at the preservation of a phantom freshness in something that is withered and gone? - Vimala Thakar


To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.
- Thomas Campbell, Hallowed Ground


In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified. - John Updike


Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember. - Seneca





Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, 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. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. - Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses


I am a miser of my memories of you
And will not spend them.
- Witter Bynner, "Coins"


Memory only slumbers—never dies. - Thomas Paine (1737–1809) + Chambers's Journal, 1868




The existence of forgetfulness has never been proved. All we know is that recollection may not be within our power. Up to the present we have filled that gap in our power with the word "forget," just as if it were another addition to our list of faculties. - Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröte – Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurteile, 1881  [No. 126 — "oblivion" or "forgetting" are sometimes translated instead of "forgetfulness." —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]


Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you! - John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany, 1989


The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory. - Author Unknown


...Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee: and in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies...
- William Wordsworth, lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 1798 July 13th





The sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that had left the conscious mind. - Thalassa Cruso, To Everything There is a Season, 1973


The two offices of memory are collection and distribution. - Samuel Johnson


Adulthood is when the ghosts of childhood appear. - Terri Guillemets


The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory. - Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love





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





Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. - Michel de Montaigne


Life is a rough biography. Memories smooth out the edges. - Terri Guillemets


The faintest waft is sometimes enough to induce feelings of hunger or anticipation, or to transport you back through time and space to a long-forgotten moment in your childhood. It can overwhelm you in an instant or simply tease you, creeping into your consciousness slowly and evaporating almost the moment it is detected. - Stephen Lacey, Scent in Your Garden, 1991


She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes. - Frank Deford


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





...and torture myself with happy thoughts... - Terri Guillemets


Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories. - From the movie An Affair to Remember, written by Delmer Daves, Donald Ogden Stewart, Leo McCarey, and Mildred Cram


It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time. - Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. - Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact. - Diane Sawyer





To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward. - Margaret Fairless Barber, The Roadmender