Memory Quotes - Page 18

Then he remembered his wedding, the old times, the first pregnancy of his wife; he, too, had been very happy the day when he had taken her from her father to his home, and had carried her off on a pillion, trotting through the snow, for it was near Christmas-time, and the country was all white. She held him by one arm, her basket hanging from the other; the wind blew the long lace of her Cauchois headdress so that it sometimes flapped across his mouth, and when he turned his head he saw near him, on his shoulder, her little rosy face, smiling silently under the gold bands of her cap. To warm her hands she put them from time to time in his breast. How long ago it all was! Their son would have been thirty by now. Then he looked back and saw nothing on the road.

Gustave Flaubert

We only reach true wisdom when we accept that we have almost certainly forgotten more than we currently remember.

Ian M Bates

As long as there is love and memory, there is no true death," - John Carstairs

Cassandra Clare

Sometimes the good memories are just as painful as the bad ones.

Emory R. Frie

…this is the problem with photographs. After a while, you can’t remember if you’re recalling the actual memory or the memory of the photograph. Or perhaps the photograph is the only reason you remember that moment. (p.85)

Michael Zadoorian

In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.

Wallace Stegner

In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness.How very clean.Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.

Minae Mizumura

I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.

Wallace Stegner

The battle for hearts and minds begins in the field of memory. And in that field, age has no limit.

Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

How much of this day have you already forgotten?

Marty Rubin

I told her I was not sure I could bear living with memories, she said, Look up at the stars, look, they are not there, what you see is the memory of what once was, once upon a time.

Rabih Alameddine

Some commit slow suicide with the sweet poison of their memories.

Javier Enríquez Serralde

Does being true to one's self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one's self? It hardly matters by this time. By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corners of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particle, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions - what happened and what might have happened - come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight. Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

What you don't know by heart you haven't really loved deeply enough

George Steiner

I long for a place that exists only in my memory –a cheery spot where my heart is happy and myspirit is free.

Peggy Toney Horton

He blurred his thens and his nows—in a fantastic drunken distortion—with the thisness and thenness of now and before, re-spectively; wisps of Bburke with Jane infiltrated him without her, the way dry oars still taste of salt. And it made Bburke trace Jane’s silhouette in his bedsheets with his lips, wondering if his sadness and loneliness was of any import to the grander human comedy, like the swooning soul of Joyce’s Gabriel, lost amidst a universe of snow—because, in small, unnoticeable ways, must not the sea taste of oars?

A.J. Smith

perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poemfrom the last years of her life that begins"I lose my screams"dear Antigone,I take it as the task of the translatorto forbid that you should ever lose your screams

Anne Carson

[In] everyday life, it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never challenged. They can, instead, be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are, or become a work in continual artistic revision.

Carl Sagan

as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

For some reason I think of the first time I saw her, kicking the shit out of the vending machine that refused to release her candy. Before that day, every hour of my life had been exactly like the one before it. Relentlessly boring. Painfully monotonous. But then she walked out of my waking nightmare and into my life, a complete mystery from Second One. Her presence was a problem I needed to solve, a problem that finally interested me. And then, somehow, she made me interested in myself. Mara began as a question I needed to answer, but the longer I'd known her, the less I felt I actually knew. She was constantly surprising, infinitely complex. Unknowable. Unpredictable. I have never met anyone more fascinating in my life, and all the time in the world wouldn't be enough to ever know her.

Michelle Hodkin

When you’re finally finished crying, I hope you run as fast and as far as you possibly can from me. When you land, out of breath, and I’m finally out of sight, finally out of mind, you’ll be honestly fine. All wounds will be healed. All fires will be extinguished. I’ll be a memory. Feel free to repress me.

Kris Kidd

Repression is dangerous. It makes anvils of memories and drops them from impossible heights when you least expect it.

Kris Kidd

I'm prepared now to use the wonderful word confluence, which of itself exists as a reality and a symbol in one. It is the only kind of symbol that for me as a writer had any weight, testifying to the pattern, one of the chief patterns, of human experience. Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memory - the individual human memory. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. Here time, also, is subject to confluence. The memory is a living thing - it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives - the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.

Eudora Welty

The music of life would be mute if the chords of memory were snapped asunder.

Jerome K. Jerome

You’re always making up stuff from the past,” she said. “And the stuff you imagine is always better than the stuff that actually happened.

Sherman Alexie

How did I picture the life after the grave? I fairly bawled out at him: "A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.

Albert Camus

Like a great ship, this season has run aground. Dawn and dusk alternate at an old man's pace. I live alone in an area known as the 'Waterside', writing a book akin to the Revelations of St. John.

Ge Fei

Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths off memory's laminated floor?

Viet Thanh Nguyen

...early on Monday evening, when the sky was the color of a velvet ribbon falling over the hills.

Alice Hoffman

Children would beg for a peppermint drop each time he walked into town, and they'd follow behind, asking for a second and a third. When he died suddenly, while working late at his office, every boy and girl in the village reported smelling mint in the night air, as if somehing sweet had passed them right by.

Alice Hoffman

It is in providing outward display for things and pathways as they exist within the horizons of landscape that places enable memories to become inwardly inscribed and possessed: made one with the memorial self. The visibility without becomes part of the invisibility within.

Edward S. Casey

Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.

Fern Schumer Chapman

... I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe—but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual; so it may be that some of these events I describe never occurred at all, but only should have, and that others had not the shades and flavors—for example, of jealousy or antiquity or shame—that I have later unconsciously chosen to give them...

Gene Wolfe

I am an old man, and I am dying...Will you remember me, Jacob?"I promise, one day, I will join you, Mr. Gold."Mr. Gold's laughter sounded like a trumpet and brought light to the corners of the room.

Noah Benshea

To lead a human life, a man must have a notion of himself as having a past and a future.

Mary Warnock

...It is only now that memory works both ways. Which of us dreamed it - those from the country of nights five times as warm and as cold, or those who turned away and woke?

Angele Ellis

Dimly--at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream--she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as as landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past.

Alastair Reynolds

Sometimes, as a great treat, I was allowed to remove Nursie's snowy ruffled cap. Without it, she somehow retreated into private life and lost her official status. Then, with elaborate care, I would tie a large blue satin ribbon round her head - with enormous difficulty and holding my breath, because tying a bow is no easy matter for a four-year-old. After which I would step back and exclaim in ecstasy: "Oh Nursie, you ARE beautiful!" At which she would smile and say in her gentle voice: "Am I, love?

Agatha Christie

But nothing happened there now of a nature to provoke a disturbance. There were no complaints to the management or the police, and the dark glory of the upper galleries was a legend in such memories as that of the late Emiel Kroger and the present Pablo Gonzales, and one by one, of course, those memories died out and the legend died out with them. Places like the Joy Rio and the legends about them make one more than usually aware of the short bloom and the long fading out of things. ("The Mysteries of the Joy Rio")

Tennessee Williams

To remember a man’s name is to give him eternal life

Bill Gunn

It's often the material things that provide the essence of memory.

Marjorie Garber

...I had been with my father so constantly for so long that I knew less and less about him with every passing year. Every meaningful image was jumbled together with the countless moments of our daily life defeating my efforts to gain some perspective.

Jane Smiley

MY GOD!' read Monte Cristo, 'LET ME KEEP MY MEMORY!

Alexandre Dumas

Memory, I must suppose, if it is neglected becomes like a box room, or a lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not only from neglect but also from too much haphazard searching in them, and things to boot thrown in that don't belong there.

Sebastian Barry

You must remind me, little one. When I... when I lose myself - when I lose her - you must remind me that I am still searching, still waiting... that I have never forgotten her, never turned from all she taught me. I sit in this place... I sit... because a king has to sit, you see... but in my mind, in my poor mind, I am always away with her....

Peter S Beagle

Shame was a peculiar beast, Naomi knew. She suspected everyone had it: the dragon they wanted to slay. But for her it was different. Naomi wanted to bathe in it, to stand under its waterfall and come out blessed.

Rene Denfeld

Consistent and chronic distractions have the power we give it focal access, to rob us of our long-term historic memory of unhurried moments in life where we are divinely invited to experience that which is the lovely, praiseworthy and excellent...give heed to the call of voices in a song that raises the vibration of a melodic verses, in such a spectacular way, that our neurons create a bio-celluar concert to revive the soul of our best memories. . .selah

Tracey Bond

Let it be emphasized once more, and especially to anyone inclined to a personally rewarding skepticism in these matters: for practical purposes, the financial memory should be assumed to last, at a maximum, no more than 20 years. This is normally the time it takes for the recollection of one disaster to be erased and for some variant on previous dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It is also the time generally required for a new generation to enter the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own innovative genius.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Memory is the mother of the muses, prototype Artist. As a rule picks and highlights what is important, omitting what is accidental or trivial. Occasionally, however, is mistaken as all the other artists. Nevertheless it is what I take as a guide page.

Frank Harris

I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn't find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible.

Annie Dillard

Islands of memory begin to rise above the river of his life. At first they are little uncharted islands, rocks just peeping above the surface of the waters. Round about them and behind in the twilight of the dawn stretches the great untroubled sheet of water; then new islands, touched to gold by the sun.

Romain Rolland

What spares us is memory,” he said. “It’s what makes us worth saving. However low we sink, whatever promise we no longer fulfill, we tell our stories. That’s why you’re so important, Charlie. You’re a guardian of our national memory.

Frederick Weisel

I try to clutch onto those last moments in the place that I was born to, but I was so busy *living* them! How was I to know I'd have to capture everything I ever wanted to remember of Eire for the rest of my life?

Kate McCafferty

That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad.

Louise Penny

He who travels much has this advantage over others – that the things he remembers soon become remote, so that in a short time they acquire the vague and poetical quality which is only given to other things by time. He who has not traveled at all has this disadvantage – that all his memories are of things present somewhere, since the places with which all his memories are concerned are present.

Giacomo Leopardi

When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor.

Vladimir Nabokov

Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.

Julian Barnes

Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.

James Carroll

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

Franklin P. Adams

But seen through a long lens, peacemaking founded on 'forgetting' appears to have a limited lifespan.

Erna Paris

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Memory Quotes - Page 18

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