Quotes about memories

page 7

“To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.”

“The gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue, but of life. It cannot be grasped by reason and memory only, but it is fully understood when it possesses the whole soul and penetrates to the inner recesses of the heart.”

“The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.”

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

“Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.”

“A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”

“These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.”

“Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation”

“May be she’ll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain.”

“Feeling no remorse must be a blessing when all you have are your memories”

“I go to my Room and I drink and I smoke some cigarettes and I think about her. I drink and I smoke and I think about her and at a certain point blackness comes and my memory fails me.”

“The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.”

“He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.”

“It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory, but when you succeed, you start to realize that you’re capable of far more than you imagined. You live in this vast body called the Universe, which contains all the solutions and all the problems. Visit your soul; don’t visit your past. The Universe goes through many mutations and carries the past with it. We call each of those mutations a ‘life,’ but just as the cells in your body change and yet you remain the same, so time does not pass, it merely changes.”

“Such is human memory… you forget the truth and believe what makes you feel better.”

“It's a little place on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory.”

“Memories of ice and Trent surfaced, and I wrapped my arms around my middle. I had saved him, and he had saved me. What was wrong with us?”

“Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.”

“Memories are like water.”

“One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.”

“Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.”

“Memory is identity…. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.”

“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”

“Memory, memoir, autobiography - lies, lies, all lies.”

“The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.”

“And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?”

“There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.”

“Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy.”

“They were like two pieces of a failed star, drawn together by a shared history and a memory of illicit kisses.”

“My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace.”

“Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”

“And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.”

“Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory…”

“[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.”

“But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.”

“[…]my memory is reasonably good—unlike yours, dear sir!”
“Mine is erratic,” he said imperturbably. “I remember only what interests me.”

“In the short term, it would make me happy to go play outside. In the long term, it would make me happier to do well at school and become successful. But in the VERY long term, I know which will make better memories.”

“She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.”

“Even as a kid, my memories are of books taking me out of myself.”

“For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.”

“There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.”

“In memory, everything seems to happen to music.”

“What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?… the thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow.”

“Who are we without our memories?”

“Our nemesis is time, against which we have a single ally, memory, and even it betrays us.”

“Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.”

“memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for”

“If this continues, if this goes on, then when I die, your memories of me will be my greatest accomplishment. You memories will be my most lasting impressions.”

“I have tried to keep memory alive… I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.”

“Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared,
and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.”

“I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)”

“Nico di Angelo has warned them: the House of Hades would stir their worst memories, make them see things and hear things from the past Their ghosts would become restless.”

“A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.”

“Memory - that fiend, that cruel enemy of comfort.”

“Regrets and apologies are all very well, but there's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them. They're like brands.”

“It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory”

“Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.”

“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined.”

“Now we're in that sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated. But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.”

“What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory… We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.”

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”

“Memory is never pure. And recollection is always coloured by the life lived since”

“Scraps of Magic:
These are little scraps of magic & when you paste them together you get a memory of something fine & strong, she said. Sometimes it takes till you're 40 to see it though.”

“Her memory's your love. You want no other.”

“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.”

“Nothing stands still, except in our memory.”

“Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.”

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

“To be in your children's memories tomorrow,
You have to be in their lives today.”

“But my memories are like a fire in winter—whenever I'm cold I can warm my hands at them.

—Ditta”

“I am made of memories.”

“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”

“For several long moments we remained locked together, and I think I covered her hair with small sacred kisses, her perfume crucifying me with memories.”

“But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.”

“Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered.”

“Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.”

“Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.”

“I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours”

“As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss.”

“God is more powerful than anybody's past, no matter how wretched. He can make us forget - not by erasing the memory but by taking the sting and paralyzing effect out of it”

“The thinnest slice would be teeming with memories of a love so strong it turned you inside out and left you gasping, and would be an identical match to a slice stored in the heart of a soul mate.”

“I’d been raised to be practical and keep my
emotions in check, but I loved cars. That was one of the few
legacies I’d picked up from my mom. She was a mechanic,
and some of my best childhood memories were of working
in the garage with her.”

“Throughout his life the memory of that happy day stayed locked secretly in (his) heart.”

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

“Man's memory shapes
Its own Eden within”

“Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.”

“What we leave behind in this life is the memory of who we were and what we did. An imprint, no more.”

“So many versions of just one memory, and yet none of them were right or wrong. Instead, they were all pieces. Only when fitted together, edge to edge, could they even begin to tell the whole story.”

“It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.”

“I don't know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it's something that anyone can make - pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad - but it carries a certain taste of memory.”

“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”

“I knew I would hate my best memory because it would prove that people could fake love or that love could end or worst of all, love was not powerful enough to change a life.”

“Time is just memory
Mixed in with Desire.”

“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”
Vita enim mortuorum in memoria vivorum est posita.

“Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.”

“Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.”

“The more distressing the memory, the more persistent it's presence.”

“She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.”

“Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”