Memories quotes
6.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside memories — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light. The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness."
"She is an excellent creature, but she can never remember which came first, the Greeks or the Romans."
"In Truth I found myself incorrigible with respect to Order; and now I am grown old, and my Memory bad, I feel very sensibly the want of it."
"The memory of a good deed lives."
"When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity."
"We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama."
"I cannot but bless the memory of Julius Caesar, for the great esteem he expressed for fat men and his aversion to lean ones."
"Healing is the process of reestablishing the integration between body, mind, and spirit, creating opportunities for the return of the memory of wholeness."
"Health is a return to our memory of wholeness."
"I'd rather do something than read about it." "That's fine, but if you do it, and then can't think what it means, it's never much of a memory. Life has more to so with memories of the past and longings for the future than it ever does with *right now*." -pg 138-9"
"The hardest memories are the pieces of what might have been."
"Memoirs are going to be problematic sells for a while, though, because even if memoir means "based in memory," right now, in the collective mind, memoir means "recovery." When my agent and I started looking at small presses the possibility for my book, I realized most small presses were not publishing memoir, because they don't want to be associated with the genre that Mary Karr calls, half-facetiously, "literature's trashy cousin.""
"Without uncertainty and the unknown, life is just a stale repetition of outworn memories. You become the victim of the past, and your tormentor today is yourself left over from yesterday. Relinquish your attachment to the known, step into the unknown, and you will step into the field of all possibilities."
"I suppose being the kind of creatures we [people] are, we like to censor the past, and are selective, or want to be selective about the things that we remember. If you want to destroy people, destroy their memory, destroy their history."
"There's an increase in serious weight disorders from cellphone use. And people who don't sleep have serious other consequences for their health that can be associated with it. There may be as well increases in problems with their memory. And all of those things are not as sexy and don't demand as much attention as cancer, but they can be very, very important from a public health point of view."
"Scots have long memories, and they're not the most forgiving of people."
"It was one of those strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of his life. There was no telling what made these moments different from any other, though he knew them when they came. He had seen sights more gruesome and more beautiful by far, and been left with no more than a fleeting muddle of their memory. But these-- the still moments, as he called them to himself-- they came with no warning, to print a random image of the most common things inside his brain, indelible."
"And if Time is anything akin to God, I suppose that Memory must be the Devil."
"Time is a lot of the things people say that God is. There's always preexisting, and having no end. There's the notion of being all powerful-because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains, not armies. And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou art dust; and unto dust thou shalt return. And if time is anything akin to God, I suppose that memory must be the devil."
"He shook his head, absorbed in one of his feats of memory, those brief periods of scholastic rapture where he lost touch with the world around him, absorbed completely in conjuring up knowledge from all its sources."
