Quotations about Memory

Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose. ~From the television show The Wonder Years


A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. ~Edward de Bono


Every man's memory is his private literature. ~Aldous Huxley


God gave us memories that we might have roses in December. ~J.M. Barrie, Courage, 1922


Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food. ~Austin O'Malley


Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things. ~Pierce Harris, Atlanta Journal


We do not remember days; we remember moments. ~Cesare Pavese, The Burning Brand


There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory. ~Josh Billings


Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us. ~Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest"


It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life. ~P.D. James


And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? ~Rainer Maria Rilke


The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume. ~Jean de Boufflers


One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
~Emily Dickinson, "Time and Eternity"


I have memories - but only a fool stores his past in the future. ~David Gerrold


A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose. ~Hortense Calisher, Queenie, 1971


Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. ~Saul Bellow


Memory itself is an internal rumour. ~George Santayana, The Life of Reason


Recalling days of sadness, memories haunt me. Recalling days of happiness, I haunt my memories. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction. ~Carol Shields


It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer? ~Lord Byron


The past is never dead, it is not even past. ~William Faulkner



The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them. ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart. ~Thomas Fuller


Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
~T.S. Eliot


What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. ~Cynthia Ozick


Memory is what tells a man that his wife's birthday was yesterday. ~Mario Rocco


To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.
~Thomas Campbell, Hallowed Ground


In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified. ~John Updike


Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember. ~Seneca


The happiest memories are of moments that ended when they should have. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. ~Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses


I am a miser of my memories of you
And will not spend them.
~Witter Bynner, "Coins"


The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory. ~Author Unknown


The sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that had left the conscious mind. ~Thalassa Cruso, To Everything There is a Season, 1973


The two offices of memory are collection and distribution. ~Samuel Johnson


The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory. ~Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love


Hmmm, how to "can a day?" You know, those days that seem just perfect you want access to them whenever the need arises. ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com


The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. ~Salvador Dali


Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. ~Michel de Montaigne


The faintest waft is sometimes enough to induce feelings of hunger or anticipation, or to transport you back through time and space to a long-forgotten moment in your childhood. It can overwhelm you in an instant or simply tease you, creeping into your consciousness slowly and evaporating almost the moment it is detected. ~Stephen Lacey, Scent in Your Garden, 1991


She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes. ~Frank Deford


The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time. ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories. ~From the movie An Affair to Remember


It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact. ~Diane Sawyer


To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward. ~Margaret Fairless Barber, The Roadmender