Memory Quotes

“The thing with giving up is you never know. You never know whether you could have done the job. And I'm sick of not knowing about my life.”
― Sophie Kinsella, Remember Me?

“People always talk like there's a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn't, at least not for me. I remember what I've imagined and imagine what I remember.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.”
― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions

“December's wintery breath is already clouding the pond, frosting the pane, obscuring summer's memory...”
― John Geddes A Familiar Rain

“You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.”
― Paul Auster

“You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.

As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost.”
― Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

“Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.”
― Anne Rice, Blood And Gold

“Paine suffered then, as now he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others...

He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds - or on persons devoted to them - have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.

When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a 'dirty little atheist' he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished. If Paine had ceased his writings with 'The Rights of Man' he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But 'The Age of Reason' cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen - a greater loss to them than to Tom Paine.

I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle; the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty.

Traducers have said that he spent his last days drinking in pothouses. They have pictured him as a wicked old man coming to a sorry end. But I am persuaded that Paine must have looked with magnanimity and sorrow on the attacks of his countrymen. That those attacks have continued down to our day, with scarcely any abatement, is an indication of how strong prejudice, when once aroused, may become. It has been a custom in some quarters to hold up Paine as an example of everything bad.

The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty - who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause - can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands.

{The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}”
― Thomas A. Edison, Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison

“Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“If we make a fly-on-the-wall review of our history and connect the significant scenarios from our memory, we can develop a comprehensive pattern of our identity that throws a whirl of light on the secreted framework of our life. ("Labyrinth of the mind")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Throughout our emotional odyssey in the unembellished narrative of our life, we may sense many alluring voices that are enticing us into a beguiling, seamless story. Our inner monologue, however, might start raising consequential questions about the scintillation of that story, about our vulnerability during the tempting process and the danger of losing our real self. The question may be asked, whether the lure might enlighten, weaken or destroy our living. While our interior monologue mostly listens to the wisdom of our experience and the guidance of our memory, it may happen that it prefers not to listen. In that event, however, unreason and passion will be calling all the shots. ( “Woman in progress” )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“We can only speak true, talk straight and be outspoken, if we prove to be able to decrypt the veiled elements of the puzzle inside and outside our environment; describe the intricacies of the social constructions and the emotional sensitivities; analyze the feasible contingencies and practical options; arbitrate and come to sensible conclusions; and invent pragmatic proposals and equitable solutions. (“Mutilated memory”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“As we go through the flightiness of time, dazed by the inebriety of our mental time voyage, we must hit the brakes, sometimes, and not shy away from questioning ourselves, when we wade through the tanning mist of our memory that embroiders our thoughts or distorts them.
("Uber alle Gipfeln ist Ruh" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Thank you“ might be the hardest word to say. We may wonder, what can be so castrating about embracing gratitude? Some think it causes fear of loss, while it unleashes indistinct anxiety of losing independence or self-control. Gratefulness might come down to an undying struggle against oblivion. It could amount to a lasting burden for maintaining the infallibility of their memory. In short, for some, thankfulness is a box of Pandora. ("Thank God for the Belgian chocolate ")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“If we take the time to unravel the surreptitious fragments from the past that are veiled in the muddle and jumble of our memory, we may single out the essentials for the present that might be best shots for the future. (Never looking back again", )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Seandainya memori seperti kaset yang dapat berulang-ulang diputar kembali.”
― Winna Efendi, Unforgettable

“When life turns out to become a muddy pool, we have got to recognize we must fire away and get down to leave for limpid waters and take possession of our dream to follow the flight of the swallows that still hover high in the blue sky of our memory. ("Halt in flight")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.”
― Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

“Willful blindness” may hinder us from discerning the critical fault lines in the narrative of our life. Our memory may obliterate then the crucial elements that are vital to really come to know ourselves. ("Non mais, t'as vu l'heure !")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“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, Ligeia

“In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.”
― Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900

“Beauty exists not in what is seen and remembered, but in what is felt and never forgotten.”
― Johnathan Jena

“Maybe we forget so that we can go on.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“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, Flaubert's Parrot

“I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can’t even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.”
― Graham Greene