c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Reading a good book in silence is like eating chocolate for the rest of your life and never getting fat.
— Becca Fitzpatrick, Kiss Me Deadly: 13 Tales of Paranormal Love
You know that moment when you hug somebody, when your heart feels warm and high in your chest and tingly? When you feel just for a second like a baby in a womb... that nothing matters? That's how I want you to feel. That's what a girlfriend should do, I think.
— Jake Vander-Ark, The Accidental Siren
Oh really I was just thinking about how great a gold filigree necklace and teardrop earrings would look on me, and at seventy five ninety nine plus shipping , its a freaking ,steal. But damn , I missed the deal because , oh that's right.. IM FUCKING FROZEN ..
— Larissa Ione, Lethal Rider
It's okay, Jasper. I, above all, know what you are feeling now. But this will be different. We’re stronger now. We will find her.” Adam gave him a rough hug before he left the shop. The sound of a car outside signaled the arrival of his brothers. Time to kick ass and find his mate.
— Carrie Ann Ryan, A Taste for a Mate
I’m almost used to you showing up without shoes, but where the hell are your pants?
— Dani Harper
Reed kissed her softly. “Live for now. Find your way. We can still be together. Forever. Don’t think about the unknown and what could happen when we don’t even know what is happening.
— Carrie Ann Ryan, Trinity Bound
He's naked," she said in a whisper louder than a yell."He knows," Cyrus said."Does he want a blanket?""Apparently not.
— Dominique Eastwick, Shifting Hearts
I'm enjoying two beautiful visions tonight. Watching you stand there against a marvelous background has to be the most intriguing sunset I have ever experienced.
— K.S. Collier
But in the end, black can never be white, one plus one must always equal two, and Mara Lynn was a normal little girl.
— Jake Vander-Ark, The Accidental Siren
Should she slam his head into the bar or toss her beer on him? Damn shame to waste good beer.
— Mina Khan, A Tale of Two Djinns
I prescribe a quick jerk off in the shower and a return to sanity. (Dr. Hugo Peralta)
— Kate Richards, An Apple Away
A series of howls and war cries echoed through the camp....The werewolves and Japanese had attacked."-pg.353 Forbidden Nights with a Vampire Kerrelyn Sparks
— Kerrelyn Sparks
These women rob me of my mind. And I don’t care.~Dr. Hugo Peralta
— Kate Richards, An Apple Away
It wasn't necessarily that I wasn't a fan of fairies. Really. It wasn't that. It was that I wasn't a fan of being taken hostage by a group of fairies.
— C.M. Stunich
As I was escorted outside by the officers, my friends looked back at me with blank expressions. I don’t think they knew what to say to me. I had lied to them about my home life. They had always been there for me and probably would have understood if I had told them the truth from the start, but it was too late. All the lies I had told them about having a perfect family had been shattered by that one incident.
— Jen Naumann, What I've Done
Soft woman and hard metal...unexpected & sexy as hell. Had she been real?
— Mina Khan, A Tale of Two Djinns
I had Japanese once. A business man I had run into in New York ... but that's not what he meant.
— L.M. DeWalt, Lily
Although only three legs would obey him, the white wolf began to run. Run, to outpace the agony that could rip and tear a human heart. Run, to outdistance the human grief that could not be borne. Run, to be as the moon, a swift white shape gleaming in the night. Run, to be a wolf and only a wolf.As he raced away into the welcoming arms of the night, James was only fleetingly aware that he had just buried his human self alongside Evelyn.And then he was aware of nothing.
— Dani Harper
By the time she yanked on her old jeans and a battered plaid flannel shirt, she felt almost normal. Calm, as she plugged in the coffee pot. But the nightmare was still very much on her mind, because it wasn’t a dream…It was a memory.
— Dani Harper
Quote from BEAUTIFULLY BROKEN – pgs. 86 -87 “A Kiss”:I went to snatch my hand away, but Trent caught my hand in his, startling me. I looked up to see warmth on his face. His smile held the promise of happiness. He scooted closer and held my gaze for a breath, glanced down. He leaned forward, as if he had no control over his actions. I inhaled his nice, soapy-clean scent, and all coherent thought left my head.His hands gripped my waist and Trent yanked me against him, his mouth covering mine in a deep kiss. The caress of his lips was softer than I’d imagined. An unfamiliar rush of excitement engulfed my senses. My hands wrapped around his neck, fingering his silky tousled hair. His moist lips seared a path from my lips to my neck, igniting a blaze of desire that flooded my skin everywhere his lips and roaming hands touched. Boys had kissed me before, but not like this. Never like this...
— Sherry Soule
He moved closer to her. “You did not have to get me anything. The fact that you did means I have been in your thoughts. I am thankful for that.
— Elizabeth Morgan, The Collector
Quote from MOONLIGHT MAYHEM – pg 224 “Hero Intercedes”:His hands flickered upward, and before I knew it, they were cupping my face. So, damnably fast now. Demonic-like fast. Trent reeled me closer. Our foreheads joined. He held me, while I trembled in his arms. I was vaguely aware of Evans and Maxwell watching, although it didn’t seem important. Nothing seemed important whenever he did this. It felt like we were enclosed in our own personal bubble made only for the two of us. Trent murmured something in my ear. We stood like that until my shaky legs gradually regained strength. I shut my eyes and pretended my body wasn’t sizzling with heat-lightning because Trent stood so close. My hormones always decided to rebel whenever he put his arms around me. And it wasn’t totally awkward and uncomfortable. No, it felt like the best thing I’d experienced since before Dad’s death. And that’s saying a lot.
— Sherry Soule
Nothing that is will always be.- Open Mic Singer
— Geoffrey Thorne, Winter of the Wild Hunt
Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.
— Guy de Maupassant
Forbidden to remember, terrified to forget; it was a hard line to walk.
— Stephenie Meyer, New Moon
Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
— Edgar Allan Poe
Memory is more indelible than ink.
— Anita Loos
The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
— Milan Kundera, Ignorance
It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.
— Ally Condie, Matched
Katniss. I remember about the bread.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
— J.M. Barrie
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
— Marcel Proust
Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
— John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Touch has a memory.
— John Keats
Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
You should always be taking pictures, if not with a camera then with your mind. Memories you capture on purpose are always more vivid than the ones you pick up by accident.
— Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
The price of a memory, is the memory of the sorrow it brings.
— Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four
A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.
— Eudora Welty
What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
The one charm about the past is that it is the past.
— Oscar Wilde
Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' says the White Queen to Alice.
— Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.
— Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
How can you just forget a person completely until the moment you see his face again?
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
Sometimes you can’t let go of the past without facing it again.
— Gail Tsukiyama, The Samurai's Garden
When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot. 
— Ann Brashares, Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
Only those with no memory insist on their originality.
— Coco Chanel
Because I might not always have you but I'll have the feeling of you for the rest of my life
— pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You
Most have been forgotten. Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best. The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both.
— George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
He looked at the silver pocketknife in his hand. An idea came to him – possibly the stupidest, craziest idea he’d had since he thought, Hey, I’ll get Percy to swim in the River Styx! He’ll love me for that!
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.
— Mark  Lawrence, King of Thorns
I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.
— Kris Kristofferson
People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things - where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance - but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting. I am exhausted from the effort to forget... There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.
— Stephen Carpenter, Killer
I feel as if I had opened a book and found roses of yesterday sweet and fragrant, between its leaves.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island
Memory believes before knowing remembers.[Light in August]
— William Faulkner, Light in August
I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.
— Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces
The people you love become ghosts inside of you, and like this you keep them alive.
— Rob Montgomery
When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable
— Martin Amis, Other People
Grey rocks, and greyer sea,  And surf along the shore -- And in my heart a name  My lips shall speak no more. 
— Charles G.D. Roberts
The thing with giving up is you never know. You never know whether you could have done the job. And I'm sick of not knowing about my life.
— Sophie Kinsella, Remember Me?
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, Son of a Witch
Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.
— Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
No one tells us, girls who don't go on dates, that remembering can be almost as good as what actually happens.
— Kathryn Stockett, The Help
Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
— Saki, Reginald
The general root of superstition : namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.
— Francis Bacon, The Collected Works of Sir Francis Bacon
Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.
— Paul Auster
He remembered Apollo, smiling and tanned and completely cool in his shades. Thalia had said, He’s hot. He’s the sun god, Percy replied. That’s not what I meant. Why was Nico thinking about that now? The random memory irritated him, made him feel jittery.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
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.
— Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Footfalls echo in the memorydown the passage we did not taketowards the door we never openedinto the rose garden. My words echothus, in your mind
— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.
— Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
Sometimes I wanted to take a memory - one perfect memory - curl up in it, and go to sleep.
— Kiersten White, Supernaturally
Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
Man's memory shapesIts own Eden within
— Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers
It didn’t take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory.
— Ali Shaw, The Girl With Glass Feet
After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?
— Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter
We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.
— J.M. Barrie, The Works Of J. M. Barrie
He remembered how nice the kids at Camp Half-Blood had been to him after the war with Kronos. Great job, Nico! Thanks for bringing the armies of the Underworld to save us! Everybody smiled. They all invited him to sit at their table. After about a week, his welcome wore thin. Campers would jump when he walked up behind them. He would emerge from the shadows at the campfire, startle somebody and see the discomfort in their eyes: Are you still here? Why are you here? It didn’t help that immediately after the war with Kronos, Annabeth and Percy had started dating … Nico set down his fartura. Suddenly it didn’t taste so good.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
It wasn't the sort of kiss I'd had with him before, hungry, wanting, desperate. It wasn't the sort of kiss I'd had with anyone before. This kiss was so soft that it was like a memory of a kiss, so careful on my lips that it was like someone running his fingers along them.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Forever
Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
I will continue my path, but I will keep a memory always.
— Rosie Thomas, Iris & Ruby
Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.
— Amy Bloom, Away
I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten
— Cesare Pavese, The Burning Brand: Diaries, 1935-1950
Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.
— Ann Patchett, What Now?
I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
But maybe that's what the dead do. They stay. They linger. Benign and sweet and painful. They don't need us. They echo all by themselves.
— Sangu Mandanna, The Lost Girl
believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade.
— Douglas Coupland
Even knowing, as I do now, that grace, power, and, yes, love can hide the darkest elements of the human heart, I would do it all again.
— Chelsey Philpot, Even in Paradise
Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
— Colum McCann, Zoli
Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory
— James Stephens, Irish Fairy Tales
Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos—like amber in which a memory gets trapped.
— Michael Chabon
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
— Sam Savage, Firmin
In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
— Edgar Allan Poe, Ligeia
Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgment.
— François de La Rochefoucauld, Ra(c)Flexions, Ou Sentences Et Maximes Morale
Harold Hill: You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. I don't know about you, but I'd like to make today worth remembering.
— Meredith Willson, The Music Man: A Musical Comedy
If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. Time: the whisper beneath that word is death. With this unanswerable weight hanging heavier and heavier over one's head, the vision becomes cloudy, nothing is what it seems... How then, can I trust my memory concerning that particular Sunday afternoon?...Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true--anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other--beneath the face of the beloved, however ancient, ruined, and scarred, is the face of the baby your love once was, and will always be, for you. Love serves, then, if memory doesn't, and passion, apart from its tense relation to agony, labors beneath the shadow of death. Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you're out there in the craft of your mortality, alone.
— James     Baldwin, Just Above My Head
I think the secret to a hoppy life is a selective memory. Remember what you are most grateful for and quickly forget what your not.
— Richard Paul Evans, Grace
It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.
— Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies
What is the past but what we choose to remember?
— Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter
She could sense it very clearly: for me, no less than for her, the past counted far more than the present, remembering something far more than possessing it. Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing, banal, inadequate ... She understood me so well! My anxiety that the present 'immediately' turned into the past so that I could love it and dream about it at leisure was just like hers, was identical. It was 'our' vice, this: to go forwards with our heads forever turned back.
— Giorgio Bassani
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.
— Diana Gabaldon, Drums of Autumn
I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised them the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
I fear it is my lot, to bide my days in hunchbacked thought, to find what I forgot.
— Roman Payne
That brief walk was one of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.[p214]
— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
Memories are nice little possessions. As long as you don't ignore the present when you take them out to play.
— Nora Roberts
Soon or late, every dog's master's memory becomes a graveyard; peopled by wistful little furry ghosts that creep back unbidden, at times, to a semblance of their olden lives.
— Albert Payson Terhune
What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that's what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they'd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the paint and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.
— John Lahr
You know, there's a reason we can remember," [Catarina] said more softly."That's much easier when your life has an expiration date.""It may be more important for us.
— Cassandra Clare, The Fall of the Hotel Dumort
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Memo﻿ry was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.
— Anne Rice, Blood And Gold
He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
Memory is like a curse. We fall into eternity, and memory is a weight that keeps pulling us to where we can never go back to.
— José Luís Peixoto, Antídoto
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, Scar Tissue
A kind of memory that tells usthat what we're now striving for was oncenearer and truer and attached to uswith infinite tenderness. Here all is distance,there it was breath. After the first  homethe second one seems draughty and  strangely sexed.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don't have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!
— Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
— Italo Calvino
But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.
— Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.
— Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn
Smells, I think, may be the last thing on earth to die.
— Fern Schumer Chapman, Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past
To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.
— Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades
When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.
— Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth
This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products
— Larry McCaffrey
I thought you had forgotten me.”“I have spent my life remembering you.
— Meredith Ann Pierce, The Son of Summer Stars
She knew with suddeness and ease that this moment would be with her always, within hand's reach of memory.She doubted if they all sensed it - they had seen the world - but even George was silent for a minute as they looked, and the scene, the smell, even the sound of the band playing a faintly recognisable movie theme, was locked forever in her, and she was at peace.
— Stephen King, Carrie
Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
We need falsifications to make the past inhabitable.
— Frans Kellendonk, Het Complete Werk
While Dmitri, as the leader of Raphael’s Seven, could not accept such a weakness, the mortal he’d once been, the one who had loved a woman with a wide mouth and eyes of slanted brown . . . that man understood what it was to love so deeply it was a kind of beautiful madness.
— Nalini Singh, Archangel's Blade
I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.
— Samantha Hunt, The Invention of Everything Else
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
— George Orwell, 1984
Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection
Dates are hard to remember because they consist of figures; figures are monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don't take hold, they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to help. Pictures are the thing. Pictures can make dates stick.
— Mark Twain
...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
— Doris Lessing
He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.
— Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive
—  hence we remember them.
In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the same of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.
— John Leonard
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.
— C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
December's wintery breath is already clouding the pond, frosting the pane, obscuring summer's memory...
— John Geddes
Touch has a memory. O say, love, say,What can I do to kill it and be free?
— John Keats
If snow melts down to water, does it still remember being snow?
— Jennifer McMahon, The Winter People
You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.
— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.
— Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
To feel successful, you must be able to be honest about the things that are really important to you.
— Daniel G. Amen
I looked around at the rooms that I did not see as rooms but more as a landscape for my emotions, a biography of memory.
— Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water
The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Here's to many more firsts and many more great memories.
— Christine Feehan, Water Bound
If you want to be able to recall everything and anything in detail,then you need to be strong enough to feel all bad memories as well.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
And of the fact that every vision of the past is a vision of the blind
— Jacques Roubaud, The Loop
Sometimes Midas suspected that life was a film with subliminal messages. Things would move along with an acceptable degree of predictability, then be punctuated by some horrible childhood memory.
— Ali Shaw, The Girl With Glass Feet
Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world.
— Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are
Memory is the basis of every journey.
— Stephen King, Dreamcatcher
If a woman is given only a limited amount of time to spend with the man she loves, she endures the separation by constantly recalling and reliving every moment down to the finest detail.
— Lucy De Barbin and Dary Matera, Are You Lonesome Tonight? The Untold Story of Elvis Presley's One True Love and the Child He Never Knew
The only thing faster than the speed of thought is the speed of forgetfulness. Good thing we have other people to help us remember.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
It is warm, I am alive, I am calm and sad, I hardly know why. In this existence so even, so tranquil, and so gentle as I have here, I am in an element that weakens me morally while strengthening me physically; and I fall into melancholies of honey and roses which are none the less melancholy. It seems to me that all those I love forget me, and that it is justice, because I live a selfish life having nothing to do for any one of them.
— George Sand
Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars
Memory is not a storage place but a story we tell ourselves in retrospect. As such, it is made of storytelling materials: embroidery and forgery, perplexity and urgency, revelation and darkness.
— Noam Shpancer, The Good Psychologist
You can never replace someone you love like that. Eventually the memories won’t be so hard on you. With time, the memories will make you smile and you will be grateful for having them.
— N.M. Facile, Across The Hall
I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us further away.
— Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase--not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been--what would you take? The last photograph you had of your mother? A birthday gift from your best friend--a bookmark embroidered by her? A ticket stub from the traveling circus that had come through town two years ago, where you and your father held your breath as jeweled ladies flew through the air, and a brave man stuck his head in the mouth of a lion? Would you take them to make wherever you were going feel like home, or because you needed to remember where you had come from?
— Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller
Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.
— William James
Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.
— Austin O'Malley
I think part of me doesn't want to remember him, for fear of missing him too much.
— Francesca Marciano, Casa Rossa
The memory of the aged becomes clearer and clearer with time. It has no pity.
— Andrea Camilleri, The Terra-Cotta Dog
What isn't remembered never happened.Memory is merely a record...you just need to rewrite that record.
— Yoshitoshi ABe
You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.
— Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things
Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.
— Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.
— Dorothy L. Sayers
When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.
— Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
What has been forgotten.... is never something purely individual.
— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.
— Marcel Proust
Nothing stays forgotten for long, Elly. Sometimes we simply have to remind the world that we're still here.
— Sarah Winman, When God Was a Rabbit
No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)
— Christopher  Nolan
Without memory there can be no insight. Without love, there can be no appreciation.
— Anne Rice
Shame has poor memory.
— Gabriel García Márquez, In Evil Hour
Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.
— Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.
— Lawrence Durrell
Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves
Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves
Let her be with her memories. Better that than be aware of this reality.
— Rosie Thomas, Iris & Ruby
They, like me, like all of us, had, once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, caught by chance a glimpse of an inner essence, only to forget what it was. It was this lost memory that pained us, reduced us to ruins, though still we struggled to be ourselves.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book
And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint's, it’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania
— Philip Roth, American Pastoral
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
— Marcel Proust
It was an image Melody would never forget. Or was it the emotions the image conjured - hope, excitement, and fear of the unknown, all three tightly braided together, creating a fourth emotion that was impossible to define. She was getting a second chance at happiness and it tickled like swallowing fifty fuzzy caterpillars.
— Lisi Harrison, Monster High
In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this simple localization of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of pyschoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.
— Gaston Bachelard
MISS PRISMMemory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.
— Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.
— Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.
— P.D. James, The Lighthouse