Quotes about memories
page 6

“Memory, of all the powers of the mind, is the most delicate and frail.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

“they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and I keep on remembering mine”

Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) American poet

“I’ll still be missing you as much as ever. I’l still smile at the memory of you. I’ll still be - Okay, I’ll say it again - loving you, but I won’t abandon myseld for you. I cannot be faithful to you without being faithful to myself.”

Jerry Spinelli book Love, Stargirl

Source: Love, Stargirl

Love, Faith, Smile

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

James Stephens book Irish Fairy Tales

Source: Irish Fairy Tales

Past, Forgetting

“You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.” Sara looked directly into his eyes. “If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

History, Change

“For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

Life, Pain

“In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Nostalgia

“How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”

Cormac McCarthy book Suttree

page 153
Source: Suttree (1979)

Death, Dead

“They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

Source: Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature

Love, Youth, Failure

“All was shattered, and all but memory lost, and one memory above all others, of him who brought the Shadow and the Breaking of the World. And him they named Dragon.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

World

“There are moments when i wish i could roll back the clock and take all the sadness away, but i have a feeling that if i did, the joy would be gone as well. So i take the memories as they come, accepting them all, letting them guide me whenever i can.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

Sadness, Feeling, Joy

“They're just memories now. Time to write them off.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

Time

“Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.”

Ann-Marie MacDonald book Fall on Your Knees

Source: Fall on Your Knees

“There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough.”

Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) American politician

Variant: There are too many books I haven't read, too many places I haven't seen, too many memories I haven't kept long enough

Books, Reading

“No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least
inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the
walls of memory.”

Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) English short story writer and novelist

Source: A Prisoner in Fairyland

“Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief.”

Jess Walter book Beautiful Ruins

Source: Beautiful Ruins

Distant, Personality

“know now what matters, and it is not what I have lost. It is my memories. Wounds heal. Love lasts.”

Kristin Hannah book The Nightingale

Source: The Nightingale

Love

“The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

The Fire of Drift-wood, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Leo had a weird memory of a missile hurtling towards him and screaming like a little girl … what the heck had that been about?”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Girl

“memories are funny things. Sometimes they’re real, but other times they change into what we want them to be”

Nicholas Sparks book The Best of Me

Source: The Best of Me

Change, Time

“A past may chase you if you try to escape from it… but once you confront it, it's just an old memory inside you. There's nothing to be afraid of.”

Kazuya Minekura (1975) Japanese manga artist

Past

“Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory —
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Music, When Soft Voices Die http://www.readprint.com/work-1367/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1821) <br class="br">Source: The Complete Poems

Love, Art, Music, Sense

“Fashion is about going ahead, not about memory.”

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

Fashion

“A man who can take anything will find most things unsatisfying. And a man without memories is just a shell.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Time Keeper

“That is the beauty of memory, isn’t it? Our reality is always clouded by our perceptions of truth. (Mnimi)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon Night Embrace

Source: Night Embrace

Truth, Beauty, Reality

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

Julio Cortázar book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“Percy grunted. “Believe me, some days I regret the choice. Oh, you want to turn down our offer? Okay, fine! ZAP! Lose your memory! Go to Tartarus!”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

“They laughed much harder than the memory was funny because it felt good to laugh.”

Shannon Hale Enna Burning

Source: Enna Burning

“Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

People, Pleasure, Youth, Sadness

“If you want to keep your memories, you first have to live them.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

“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 book Beautiful Lies

Source: Beautiful Lies

“The only way to solace anyone who loved you in life is to be a good memory”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

Source: By The Light Of My Father's Smile

Love, Life, Way

“Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

Marriage, Time

“And I began to feel sorry for myself; for so many years, my drawer full of memories had held the same old stories.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Feeling

“The color white is the absence of memory.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Color

“Books are like flypaper, memories cling to the printed pages better than anything else.”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

Source: Inkheart

Books

“Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live?”

Diane Ackerman (1948) Author, poet, naturalist

Life

“I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.”

Lawrence Durrell book Justine

Source: Justine

Happiness, Lie

“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: Der blinde Mörder

Dogs

“She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Tear

“It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.”

Mark Vonnegut (1947) American physician and writer

Source: The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

Pain

“Memories did one no good, not when one knew the truth in the present”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Truth

“The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.”

Michel Faber book The Book of Strange New Things

Source: The Book of Strange New Things

World, Change

“People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

People

“I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

Past

“She was still there inside me now, just as she always was: a life put on hold, a memory I didn't know how to handle.”

Banana Yoshimoto book Hardboiled & Hard Luck

Source: Hardboiled & Hard Luck

Life

“Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.”

Mary Karr (1955) American writer

History

“Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

Love

“Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.”

Amy Bloom (1953) Fiction writer, screenwriter, social worker, psychotherapist

Source: Away

“Maybe memories should be left the way they are.”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

Source: On the Jellicoe Road

Way

“Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.”

Kazuo Ishiguro (1954) Japanese-born British author

“You have been with me from the very first life. You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my lives. It`s you who makes me a person.”

Ann Brashares book My Name is Memory

Source: My Name Is Memory

Life, Time, Personality

“The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Pain, Time

“Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.”

Marilynne Robinson Gilead

Source: Gilead

“He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

Game, Reality

“The heart, like the mind, has a memory.
And in it are kept the most precious keepsakes.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

Heart

“Feeling this way was a particular kind of horror, having the emotions without the memories.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Welcome to Shadowhunter Academy

Way, Feeling

“Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

Heart

“Sincerity and gravity, in Magnus's opinion, were highly overrated, as was being forced to relive unpleasant memories. He would much rather be amused and amusing.”

Cassandra Clare The Bane Chronicles

Source: The Bane Chronicles

Sincerity

“The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

Thinking

“People don't remember me. Really. It's not a paranoid thing; I just have this habit of slipping through memories. It doesn't bother me all that much, except I guess that's a lie; it does. For some reason, I test very high on forgettability.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

People, Lie

“If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase-not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been-what would you take?”

Jodi Picoult book The Storyteller

Source: The Storyteller

Life, People, Girl, Clothes

“If I can live through the events,” she said, “I can get through the memories.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Reborn

“I was starting to think I was making up memories, just to have answers.
Our brain does that sometimes.
Or at least mine does.”

David Levithan book Every You, Every Me

Source: Every You, Every Me

Thinking

“I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps. We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves!”

Erica Jong book Fear of Flying

Source: Fear of Flying

“Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Diary

Source: Diary

Happiness

“It's always hard when you've known a person a long time and then you have to recognise that you have nothing left in common but your memories.”

Eva Heller book Beim nächsten Mann wird alles anders

Source: Beim nächsten Mann wird alles anders

Time, Personality

“No,' he said, 'memory's a poor thing to have. It's your own real hair and mouth and arms and eyes and hands I want. I didn't know I could ever love anything so much…”

Philip Pullman book The Amber Spyglass

Source: The Amber Spyglass

Love

“That’s the last time you’re going to kiss me,” I warned when it ended.
He smiled knowingly, and in his eyes, I could see his own memories of that night. “So you say.”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Source: Storm Born

Smile, Kiss, Time, Night

“Remember my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Source: Dracula

Knowledge

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

Pain, Pleasure

“When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

Travel

“Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.”

Pat Conroy book The Prince of Tides

Source: The Prince of Tides

Dreams, Sleep

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

Colum McCann Zoli

Source: Zoli

“there was a time when these weren't memories.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Time

“There are memories that time does not erase… Forever does not make loss forgettable, only bearable.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Loss, Time

“I think it would be interesting if old people got anti-Alzheimer's disease where they slowly began to recover other people's lost memories.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

People, Disease, Thinking

“I don’t want to be
one of those easily forgotten people, so important at the time, so special, so
influential, and so treasured, yet years later just a vague face and a distant
memory.”

Cecelia Ahern book Love, Rosie

Variant: I don’t want to be one of those easily forgotten people, so important at the time, so special, so influential, and so treasured, yet years later just a vague face and a distant memory. I want us to be best friends forever
Source: Love, Rosie

People, Distant, Time

“It wasn't that long, and it certainly wasn't the kind of kiss you see in movies these days, but it was wonderful in its own way, and all I can remember about the moment is that when our lips touched, I knew the memory would last forever.”

Nicholas Sparks book A Walk to Remember

Source: A Walk to Remember

Way, Kiss

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

As quoted in Grace Notes (1989) by Rita Dove

Water, Perfection

“The man that I named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing.”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

Love, Pain, Truth, Books

“And here in this room, I re-experience the memories again and again it is how wisdom comes and how we shape our future.”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

Wisdom, Future

“Memories were fine, but you couldn't touch them. They were never exactly as the moment had been, & they faded w/ time”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Variant: Memories were fine but you couldn't touch them, smell them or hold them. They were never exactly as the moment was, and they faded with time.

Time