Memory Quotes

“If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases hurting stays in the memory.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Nothing about these times makes any sense. Nothing. Putting it to words only makes it sound too simple.”
― Ralph Webster, A Smile in One Eye: a Tear in the Other

“The human brain has a marvelous capacity to screen and sort experience, protecting itself against the unbearable.”
― Rick Yancey, The Last Star

“The fact is that I hate this city. I've hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I'd seen old Yardley Slickers- the makeup now just a waxy crumble- sell for almost one hundred dollars on the internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it- to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been, still existed inside of them.

There were so many things that returned me. The tang of soy, the smoke in someone's hair, the grassy hills turning blond in June. An arrangement of oaks and boulders could, seen out of the corner of my eye, crack open something in my chest, palms going suddenly slick with adrenaline.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Our evolution depends on our memory. If we keep forgetting the mistakes of the past, only to keep repeating them, then we will never change. Humanity will never move forward, spiritually or morally, to become superior beings.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“But the lost one is with you.
Her tenderness strengthens you,
Her gaiety uplifts you,
Her honor purifies you.
More than memory,
The lost one is found.”
― Gail Carson Levine, Ella Enchanted

“There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already.”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell

“This landscape is animate: it moves, transposes, builds, proceeds, shifts, always going on, never coming back, and one can only retain it in vignettes, impressions caught in a flash, flipped through in succession, leaving a richness of images imprinted on a sunburned retina.”
― Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon

“Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890: “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out,” he wrote. “But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.” Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human,” said Ed.”
― Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“I lived here once," the author said after a moment.
"Here? For a long time?"
"No. For just a little while when I was young."
"It must have been rather cramped."
"I didn't notice."
"Would you like to try it again?"
"No. And I couldn't if I wanted to."
He shivered slightly and closed the windows. As they went downstairs, the visitor said, half apologetically: "It's really just like all houses, isn't it?"
The author nodded.
"I didn't think it was when I built it, but in the end I suppose it's just like other houses after all.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography

“I shall never forget you. I have never forgotten anyone whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to be so.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“The experience was like running into someone you hadn't seen since middle school - you recognize them, but what you really notice is the ways they've changed. They don't match your memory of how they should look and for a second you're thrown off, because your memory of them IS them.”
― Rick Yancey, The Last Star

“Where were you
when
I undressed and told the tales of my day?
Where were you
when
I was silent with God in prandial pray?
Where were you
when
I recited love poems as I lay?
Where were you?”
― Kamand Kojouri

“If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient - at others, so bewildered and so weak - and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! - We are to be sure a miracle every way - but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“Daily life is an ongoing adaptation process of imprinting our memory’s storage center with useful data and the ceaseless expurgation of undesirable facts, exfoliation of destructive thoughts, and weeding out annoying emotional quirks that seemingly sprout out of thin air.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Memory, imagination, and passionately responding in accord with the deeply embedded impulse to act with decency are pliable mechanisms that we can employ to attain happiness.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“If we could imagine, while we live them, to what mundane moments nostalgia manages to stick itself...”
― Luigina Sgarro

“I want to remember what we were like before we became ourselves.”
― Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever

“Memories of one's past are tainted. There are no truths to be found in them.”
― Morgan Rhodes, The Darkest Magic

“I know what success means to me – it is when you look back at your life and the memories make you smile. That’s what success is to me”
― Debalina Haldar, Wrinkles in Memory

“Да, часть людей понимают, что это Путин, и что это путь в никуда и катастрофическое падение нравов и каких-то зачатков демократии, которые у нас были при Ельцине, который тоже был фигурой противоречивой — но народ тогда говорил. А теперь я иду в какой-нибудь магазин — непременно кто-нибудь подходит: "Ой, Аня, мы вас так поддерживаем, так понимаем, что ты делаешь" — но говорят обязательно очень тихо, почти на ухо. Рассуждать о том, почему так случилось, можно очень долго. Но я думаю, что это оттого, что на ключевых позициях расставлены КГБшники. А генетическая память людей такова, что ЭТОМУ сопротивляться нельзя.”
― Анна Политковская

“Я не принимал участие ни в каких торжественных мероприятиях [14.10.2016], ни в каких шествиях, парадах. Кстати, мне очень непонятно, чего это вдруг парад "Азова" ― это "парад патриотов"? Тогда парад "Свободы" ― это парад кого... барабанов? Я не пошел ни туда, ни сюда, а вместе со своей семьей сегодня поехал по кладбищам, где похоронены пацаны. Я не патриот?

Я разговаривал с семьей на Лесном кладбище, где похоронен боец "Азова" с позывным "Вальтер". Я стоял с его вдовой, с его дочерью, с его братом и женой брата. И никого там больше не было. Ни барабанов, ни факелов. Там вообще никого не было.”
― Георгий Тука

“[Ж]одних двадцяти восьми героїв-панфіловців не було, їх усіх придумав журналіст Олександр Кривицький, якого я особисто знав як великого брехуна. [...] Він був фантазер не гірше нинішніх, а коли був би живим, охоче розповів би нам про двадцять вісім розіп'ятих хлопчиків.
[...]
— Гаразд, — сказав він, — ну, припустимо, все було, як ви кажете. Припустимо, двадцяти восьми панфіловців не було, але навіщо ви все це розповідаєте?

Я знизав плечима. Що ж тут незрозумілого? Народ же мусить знати правду, що і як було насправді.

— Дурниці це все, — сказав він. — Народ мусить знати. Та нічого він не мусить. І що цікавіше за все, не хоче він знати вашої правди. В світі ілюзій жити набагато цікавіше. І ваша справа, якщо ви письменник, не викривати давні міфи, а створювати нові [103].”
― Володимир Войнович, Малиновый пеликан

“But who cares? Memory isn't about reality, and neither is music. It's about the comforting reflections we want to hold on to, even if they're mostly bullshit.”
― Spitznagel, Eric

“You may be anybody now. One day, you will be just a faded memory.”
― Aditya Ajmera

“Life is like a clock, it goes round and round, until the battery dies. Unlike clocks when humans die, they are either dead for good or they are still alive in the minds of others. To live on after death one must make a name for himself, if one fails to make a name for himself, then he will die alone, and forgotten.”
― Satuin Segi

“Marina wouldn't want to be remembered because she dead. She would want to be remembered because she's good.”
― Anne Fadiman, The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

“I wish nights like this weren't so fragile and slippery and impossible to nail down for study in one's leisure. But the really great nights pass through you like whispers or shadows. They shimmer, but don't adhere.”
― Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life