“Who are we without our memories?”

“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 book Son of a Witch

“We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

“We become imprisoned by our memories, and that makes our lives wretched.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

“When our memories outweigh our dreams, it is then that we become old.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

“There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance.”

Gilbert Parker (1862–1932) Canadian novelist and British politician

“A people's memory is history; and as a man without a memory, so a people without a history cannot grow wiser, better.”

Isaac Leib Peretz (1852–1915) Yiddish language author and playwright

“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

“"Old" and "new" are the perennial poles of all feeling and sense of orientation in the world. We cannot do without the old, because in what is old is invested all our past, our wisdom, our memories, our sadness, our sense of realism. We cannot do without faith in the new, because in what is new is invested all our energy, our capacity for optimism, our blind biological yearning, our ability to forget — the healing ability that makes reconciliation possible.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

“Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator