Memory Quotes

“Each in the most hidden sack kept
the lost jewels of memory,
intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,
the fragment of public or private happiness.
A few, the wolves, collected thighs,
other men loved the dawn scratching
mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.
For me happiness was to share singing,
praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.
I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:
my life had no use on earth.”
― Pablo Neruda, Still Another Day

“I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.”
― Stephen King

“Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~Candle”
― Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch

“when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. ”
― Steiner G

“Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Only one who loves can remember so well.”
― Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

“Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“CLEMENTINE: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon.
JOEL: I know.
CLEMENTINE: What do we do?
JOEL: Enjoy it.”
― Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting Script

“... And the boy whose hair remained the color of lemons forever.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Grey rocks, and greyer sea,
And surf along the shore --
And in my heart a name
My lips shall speak no more.
”
― Charles G.D. Roberts

“[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“Even if we have bad feelings about our past and it causes a sense of alienation, it belongs to our history. Its benchmarks are stored in the granary of our mind and crucial evaluations for the future cannot be made without consulting the archive of our memory. ( “Not without the past”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“The general root of superstition : namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.”
― Francis Bacon, The Collected Works of Sir Francis Bacon (Unexpurgated Edition)

“Things as they appear every day and as they are engraved in our memory, facts and occurrences as they are perceived by senses, create an intricate labyrinth in the mind. The way how things are experienced in our environment and how they react in the arsenal of our imagination, creates a torrent of inspiring ideas that flood the speedy highways of our brains.
( " Labyrinth of the mind " )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“When we are “time traveling”, we may trip over problems from the past which distort our memory. If we are weary of dealing with lost causes or lame ducks in our history, we have to make up our mind and give up destructive thinking patterns. At that juncture, time has come to go back to the future. ( “A glimpse of the future" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Life is merely a series of moments and is in fact an unflinching serial killer, since it kills steadily each moment one after the other. Memory is the only survivor. (“Just for a moment”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgment.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions, Ou Sentences Et Maximes Morale (Éd.1665) (Litterature)

“A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, The Story of a Marriage

“Some ephemeral moments must be given a memory, because the temporality of an instant may radiate a twinkle of eternity.( "Crystallization under an umbrella" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“In the beginning was the word and the word was love and love was imagination. When love takes us through the sun-dappled garden of our imagination, no stalking horses can perturb the rainbow in our mind or fade out its bright colors reflecting in the blue sky of our memory. ("Alpha and Omega")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Then one morning she’d begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn’t remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she’d realized again what she’d learned at five when her mother left – that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting the small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she’d worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother’s voice, the color of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree’s heartwood.”
― Ron Rash, Serena

“It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“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.”
― Martina Boone, Compulsion

“Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“The work of memory collapses time.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Sometimes I wanted to take a memory - one perfect memory - curl up in it, and go to sleep.”
― Kiersten White, Supernaturally

“To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.”
― Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium