Quotes about memorial
page 7

“People without memory are putty.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

People, Memory

“And your own life while it's happening to you never has any atmosphere until it's a memory.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Life, Memory

“I want to make a memorial for our turkey. Never has a bird been so tortured to provide such a lousy dinner.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

Bird, Memory

“Memories did one no good, not when one knew the truth in the present. Will was beautiful, but he was not hers; he was anybody's. Something in him was broken, and trough that break spilled a blind cruelty, a need to hurt and to push away.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Truth, Beauty, Memory, Hurt

“Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.”

Rabih Alameddine book An Unnecessary Woman

Source: An Unnecessary Woman

Hope, Memory

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Tear, Memory, Sad

“Good memories are like charms… Each is special. You collect them, one by one, until one day you look back and discover they make a long, colorful bracelet.”

James Patterson book Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Source: Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Color, Memory

“They are all I have left—the stars and the memory of the many times I wished upon them. But with all those wishes, I asked for only one thing.

To see him again.

But I will not see him again. I do not see him now.”

Christopher Pike (1954) American author Kevin Christopher McFadden

Source: The Starlight Crystal

Star, Memory, Time

“Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I'm a mix-tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.”

Rob Sheffield (1966) American music journalist

Source: Love Is a Mix Tape

Feeling, Memory, Time

“Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.”

Julian Barnes book England, England

Source: England, England

Dreams, Memory, Childhood

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

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Source: The Count of Monte Cristo

Learning, Memory

“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.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Source: Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life

Life, Soul, Memory, 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.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: On Love

Life, Fear, Memory

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

Michael Ignatieff book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue

Memory, Forgetting

“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.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Ficciones

Source: Ficciones

Life, School, Memory, Time

“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.”

Sebastian Barry (1955) Irish author

Source: Days Without End: A Novel

Memory, Forgetting

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell book Justine

Source: Justine

Memory

“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”

Pat Conroy book The Prince of Tides

Source: The Prince of Tides

Dreams, Soul, Sleep, Memory

“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.”

Stephen King book Pet Sematary

Source: Pet Sematary

Life, Death, Pain, Learning

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

Jon Ronson (1967) British journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio presenter and nonfiction author

Source: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

Feeling, Memory

“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.”

James Frey book A Million Little Pieces

Source: A Million Little Pieces

Drink, Thinking, Memory

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

Gregory Maguire book A Lion Among Men

Source: A Lion Among Men

Way, Memory, Past, Future

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love, Happiness, Memory, Time

“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.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Aleph (2011)

Life, Soul, Imagination, Problem

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

Rick Riordan book The Sword of Summer

Source: The Sword of Summer

Truth, Feeling, Memory, Forgetting

“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.”

Stephen King book Different Seasons

Source: Different Seasons

Life, 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?”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Black Magic Sanction

Memory

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

China Miéville book The Scar

Source: The Scar

Memory, Past

“Memories are like water.”

Julianna Baggott book Pure

Source: Pure

Water, Memory

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

Rita Mae Brown (1944) Novelist, poet, screenwriter, activist

Happiness, Memory, Funny, Happy

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

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

War, World, Thinking, Memory

“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.”

Julian Barnes (1946) English writer

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Life, Death, Memory, Forgetting

“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

Source: Son of a Witch

Memory, Heart, Parting

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

Rabih Alameddine book An Unnecessary Woman

Source: An Unnecessary Woman

Memory

“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.”

Howard Zinn book A People's History of the United States

Source: A People's History of the United States

People, Memory

“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?”

Emily Brontë book Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell

Source: Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell

Pain, World, Drink, Memory

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

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

Memory

“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.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Source: The Count of Monte Cristo

Understanding, Knowledge, Learning, Memory

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

Cinda Williams Chima (1952) Novelist

Source: The Crimson Crown

History, Star, Kiss, Memory

“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.”

Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995) American novelist and short story writer

Love, Hate, Peace, Memory

“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.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Chapter 3, "The lazy controller", page 46 (ISBN 9780141033570).

Intelligence, Memory

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

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

Sister, Memory

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

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go

Memory, Parting

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

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Memory, Future

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

Chris Bohjalian (1962) American novelist

Source: Secrets of Eden

Memory

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

Georgette Heyer book Frederica

Source: Frederica

Memory

“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.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: It's a Magical World: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection

Happiness, School, Memory, Success

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

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

Love, Memory

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

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Books, Memory

“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.”

Alan Lightman book Einstein's Dreams

Source: Einstein's Dreams

Kiss, Memory, Passion, Night

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

Gillian Flynn book Gone Girl

Source: Gone Girl

Feeling, Memory

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

Jenny Han book P.S. I Still Love You

Source: P.S. I Still Love You

Music, Memory

“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.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

Memory

“Who are we without our memories?”

Marta Acosta American novelist

Source: Dark Companion

Memory

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

Sam Tanenhaus (1955) American writer

Source: Literature Unbound

Memory, Time

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

Tom Robbins Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Source: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Love, Memory, For Him, For Boyfriend

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

Zelda Fitzgerald book Save Me the Waltz

Source: Save Me the Waltz

Memory

“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.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

Memory

“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.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Memory, Fight, Forgetting

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

Aleksandar Hemon Nowhere Man

Source: Nowhere Man

Life, Memory

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

Milan Kundera The Joke

Source: The Joke

Memory

“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.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Memory, Past, Housing

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

Edward de Bono (1933) Maltese physician

Memory

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

Paullina Simons book Tatiana and Alexander

Source: Tatiana and Alexander

Memory

“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.”

John Boyne (1971) Irish novelist, author of children's and youth fiction

Source: Mutiny on the Bounty

Life, Memory, Heart, Personality

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

Christopher Hitchens Mortality

Source: Mortality

Pain, 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.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Memory

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

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things

Life, Death, Memory

“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.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Katniss and Plutarch Heavensbee (p. 379)
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)
Context: “Are you preparing for another war, Plutarch?” I ask.
“Oh, not now. Now we’re in that sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated,” he says. “But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We’re fickle, stupid beings with a great gift for self-destruction. Although who knows? Maybe this will be it, Katniss.”
“What?” I ask.
“The time it sticks. Maybe we are witnessing the evolution of the human race. Think about that.“

Stupidity, Thinking, Memory