Memory Quotes - Page 22

Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.

Dates are hard to remember because they consist of figures; figures are monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don't take hold, they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to help. Pictures are the thing. Pictures can make dates stick.

Mark Twain

...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

Doris Lessing

He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

Graham Greene

A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

Vladimir Nabokov

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the same of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.

John Leonard

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.

C.S. Lewis

December's wintery breath is already clouding the pond, frosting the pane, obscuring summer's memory...

John Geddes

I fear it is my lot, to bide my days in hunchbacked thought, to find what I forgot.

Roman Payne

That brief walk was one of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.[p214]

John Green

Memories are nice little possessions. As long as you don't ignore the present when you take them out to play.

Nora Roberts

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

What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that's what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they'd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the paint and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

John Lahr

You know, there's a reason we can remember," [Catarina] said more softly."That's much easier when your life has an expiration date.""It may be more important for us.

Cassandra Clare

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

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

Anne Rice

He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

Julian Barnes

Memory is like a curse. We fall into eternity, and memory is a weight that keeps pulling us to where we can never go back to.

José Luís Peixoto

Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.

Michael Ignatieff

A kind of memory that tells usthat what we're now striving for was oncenearer and truer and attached to uswith infinite tenderness. Here all is distance,there it was breath. After the first homethe second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

Rainer Maria Rilke

He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.

Marcel Proust

After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don't have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!

Steve Toltz

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

Italo Calvino

But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

Marcel Proust

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.

Julio Cortázar

And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.

Mohsin Hamid

I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.

Neil Gaiman

And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.

Jonathan Safran Foer

But maybe that's what the dead do. They stay. They linger. Benign and sweet and painful. They don't need us. They echo all by themselves.

Sangu Mandanna

believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade.

Douglas Coupland

Even knowing, as I do now, that grace, power, and, yes, love can hide the darkest elements of the human heart, I would do it all again.

Chelsey Philpot

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

Colum McCann

Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory

James Stephens

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

Robert Penn Warren

A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos—like amber in which a memory gets trapped.

Michael Chabon

I always think everything is going to last forever, but nothing ever does. In fact nothing exists longer than an instant except the thing that we hold in memory

Sam Savage

In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

Edgar Allan Poe

Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgment.

François de La Rochefoucauld

Harold Hill: You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. I don't know about you, but I'd like to make today worth remembering.

Meredith Willson

If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. Time: the whisper beneath that word is death. With this unanswerable weight hanging heavier and heavier over one's head, the vision becomes cloudy, nothing is what it seems... How then, can I trust my memory concerning that particular Sunday afternoon?...Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true--anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other--beneath the face of the beloved, however ancient, ruined, and scarred, is the face of the baby your love once was, and will always be, for you. Love serves, then, if memory doesn't, and passion, apart from its tense relation to agony, labors beneath the shadow of death. Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you're out there in the craft of your mortality, alone.

James Baldwin

I think the secret to a hoppy life is a selective memory. Remember what you are most grateful for and quickly forget what your not.

Richard Paul Evans

It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.

Lisa Unger

What is the past but what we choose to remember?

Amy Tan

She could sense it very clearly: for me, no less than for her, the past counted far more than the present, remembering something far more than possessing it. Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing, banal, inadequate ... She understood me so well! My anxiety that the present 'immediately' turned into the past so that I could love it and dream about it at leisure was just like hers, was identical. It was 'our' vice, this: to go forwards with our heads forever turned back.

Giorgio Bassani

It was one of those strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of his life. There was no telling what made these moments different from any other, though he knew them when they came. He had seen sights more gruesome and more beautiful by far, and been left with no more than a fleeting muddle of their memory. But these-- the still moments, as he called them to himself-- they came with no warning, to print a random image of the most common things inside his brain, indelible.

Diana Gabaldon

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised them the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.

Marcel Proust

Footfalls echo in the memorydown the passage we did not taketowards the door we never openedinto the rose garden. My words echothus, in your mind

T.S Eliot

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

Julio Cortázar

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

Sometimes I wanted to take a memory - one perfect memory - curl up in it, and go to sleep.

Kiersten White

Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.

Haruki Murakami

Man's memory shapesIts own Eden within

Jorge Luis Borges

It didn’t take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory.

Ali Shaw

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

Amy Tan

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

A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.

J.M. Barrie

He remembered how nice the kids at Camp Half-Blood had been to him after the war with Kronos. Great job, Nico! Thanks for bringing the armies of the Underworld to save us! Everybody smiled. They all invited him to sit at their table. After about a week, his welcome wore thin. Campers would jump when he walked up behind them. He would emerge from the shadows at the campfire, startle somebody and see the discomfort in their eyes: Are you still here? Why are you here? It didn’t help that immediately after the war with Kronos, Annabeth and Percy had started dating … Nico set down his fartura. Suddenly it didn’t taste so good.

Rick Riordan

It wasn't the sort of kiss I'd had with him before, hungry, wanting, desperate. It wasn't the sort of kiss I'd had with anyone before. This kiss was so soft that it was like a memory of a kiss, so careful on my lips that it was like someone running his fingers along them.

Maggie Stiefvater

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Memory Quotes - Page 22

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