c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I may be just an empty flesh terminal reliant on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that everything that makes me a unique human being is still out there somewhere, safe in a theoretical storage space owned by giant, multinational corporations.
— Stephen Colbert
When you can see your life in retrospect, the romanticism of how good things once were gives way to the reality that positives and negatives comprise every day and every decade. (235)
— Victoria Moran, Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit
I can't say why some memories float and other sink.
— Francesca Marciano, Casa Rossa
Try to capture what you can't bear to be without
— Rosie Thomas, Iris & Ruby
To my mind's eye, my buried memories of Brandham Hall are like effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it is only with effort that I see them in terms of colour. There are things I know, though I don't know how I know them, and things that I remember. Certain things are established in my mind as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like the landscape of a dream.
— L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult loves.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.
— Henry Hazlitt, Thinking as a Science
At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (representational processes of memory and narrative) of mental life. The matter of the mind matters for secure attachments.
— Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are
At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory.
— W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
Except for a couple of hours in the morning which I passed in the company of a sage I stayed in bed without food only a few mouthfuls of water “you are a fine looking old man” I said to myself in the mirror “and what is more you have the correct attitude You don’t care if it ends or if it goes on And as for the women and the music there will be plenty of that in Paradise” Then I went to the Mosque of Memory to express my gratitude 
— Leonard Cohen
One of my friends at the Compound has a photographic memory. Everything she ever sees, reads, or hears, she remembers forever in perfect detail.
— Kasie West, Pivot Point
Homeopaths argue that water has a memory.
— Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y
The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.
— E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
We carry our childhood with us.
— Gary D. Schmidt
People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people
— Alasdair Gray, Poor Things
People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection.
— Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines
The mature brain is a time capsule. History resides in its structure.
— Julian B. Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe
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
— Dean Hughes, Before the Dawn
Some things I can never forget. I must not. Otherwise what do I have left?
— Rosie Thomas, Iris & Ruby
I make a rule never to remember anything before last week. It makes life more interesting
— Jude Morgan, Indiscretion
Memories are either the greatest poetry, when they are memories of a vital happiness, or a burning pain, when they touch dried wounds.p. 479
— Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.
— W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
... and then beginning to go back to what you can't even remember.
— Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Again his memory failed to conjure her face. It was like trying to call up a melody while another song played.
— Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone
That’s a bit sweeping. Sometimes it takes a while to find out how good or bad something has been.
— Sophie Page, To Marry a Prince
Only one who loves can remember so well.
— Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories
Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night—little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape wil be quite hidden in the end.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lost
— Kevin Arnold
I remember everything about it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent.
— J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla
I had been riding horses before my memory kicked in, so my life with horses had no beginning. It simply appeared from the fog of infancy. I survived a difficult childhood by traveling on the backs of horses, and in adulthood the pattern didn't change.
— Monty Roberts, The Horses in My Life
Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.
— Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
The past informs the present. Memory makes the map we carry, no matter how hard we try to erase it.
— Cara Black, Murder in the Bastille
The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map.
— Fern Schumer Chapman, Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past
Was memory always as much of a burden as it could sometimes be a blessing.
— Mary Balogh, Simply Magic
So one can lose a good ideaby not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asidesit knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiationsare terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and doesrecognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier.
— John Ashbery, Flow Chart
Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American
What makes and experience a memory is when we share with someone, the emotions we felt
— Jeremy Aldana, Boys Will Be Boys
Do you remember those days? Back porch, sunshine, mason jars" - she paused at remembered sweetness - "we were so foolish then...thinking there was a big ol' world out there to conquer.
— Melissa Marr, Graveminder
I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place goodbye so regretfully. I have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness, and the memory of it will remain with me always.
— Mark Twain
Most people, looking back at their childhood, see it as a misty country half-forgotten or only to be remembered through an evocative sound or scent, but some episodes of those short years remain clear and brightly coloured like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope.
— D.E. Stevenson, Listening Valley
As we age we begin to grasp at youthful bliss like a life raft in a sea of harsh reality.
— Brad Herzog, Turn Left At The Trojan Horse: A Would-Be Hero's American Odyssey
It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven...
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
The faces you clutch at desperately slip away; it's when you're not thinking about them that their features flash past. It can happen on a street corner, at the turn of a staircase, because somebody said a word, because some image, an image has passed. Then the face is there for a split second, very fragile. One mustn't grasp at it, or it whisks away. One might as well try and catch a cloud. It was a cloud.
— François Maspero, Cat's Grin
In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.
— Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife
Anna woke with the wonderful feeling bad sleepers have when they know they have slept well. As if they have stolen something and got away with it. At these times the memories of what led up to such deep sleep keep their distance for a few seconds and those few seconds are perhaps the only time the world can ever be said to show mercy.
— James Meek, The People's Act of Love
Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.
— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
— Mary Karr
My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, theywere everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art, are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging, eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards won for all mankind; the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of survival starts again.The human soul enjoys these rare, classic periods, but, apart from them, we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with a hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfeits of ourselves -- the sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine and the sleep-walker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image, indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind unnoticed, or to dodge down a side street, pause, breathe freely and take our bearings, or to push ahead, out-distance our shadows, lead them a dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one another askance, knowing we have a secret we shall never share.
— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.
— Ali Smith, The Whole Story and Other Stories
You remind me of a boy I used to knowSame Smile, same easy, laid-back styleAnd man, could he kissBlew my mind the very first timeHis lips touched mine.You remind me You remind me of a boy I used to like.Same eyes, strong arms, same open mindAnd man, could he danceArms around me, lost in a tranceI'd hear his heartYou remind meI'm scared of youHow did you find me?Turn and walk away'Cause you remind meYou remind me of a boy I used to loveSame laughter and tears, shared through the years And man, how he feltMade my bones more than meltHe touched my soul.You remind meI'm scared of youHow did you find me?Turn and walk away'Cause you remind me
— Malorie Blackman, Checkmate
Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur.
— Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace
Start with a blank surface. It doesn't have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember.
— Stephen King
He did not have anything on him except her thoughts, except the good times he had once shared and the bad times he so desperately wanted to forget.
— Faraaz Kazi
We humans are different--our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them. Our recollections change in their retelling.
— Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace
Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything to the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past.
— César Aira, The Seamstress and the Wind
Reiko had not kept a diary and was now denied the pleasure of assiduously rereading her record of the happiness of the past few months and consigning each page to the fire as she did so.- Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
— Yukio Mishima, Patriotism
I prefer to rely on my memory. I have lived with that memory a long time, I am used to it, and if I have rearranged or distorted anything, surely that was done for my own benefit.
— Leon Festinger
I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That’s why I want to write a book.
— Haruki Murakami
Hesitantly, I touched the stump where my finger used to be. In my mind, something almost remembered itself, but the fumes of turpentine were making me a little lightheaded; whatever memory was on the verge of coughing itself up was gone even before it materialized. Out the window, I could see a squirrel was stumbling erratically around in circles underneath the old basketball net. Then I realized that it wasn't a squirrel; it was a brown paper bag.
— Dan Chaon, Stay Awake
At the end of this journey, it seems to me that reconciling the long shadows cast by the uneasy past may ultimately depend on elements so basic that they bring to mind a simple Slav proverb I once came across and never forgot: Eat bread and salt and speak the truth. They are the recovery of fact, public accountability and the instituting of fair trials of one sort or another, to help mark ends and beginnings and to return the moral compass as close to the centre as possible.
— Erna Paris, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History
Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but I could not find that castle today, nor tell you the color of that woman's hair. Who knighted me, old friend? What were my favorite foods? It all fades. Sometimes I think I was born on the bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of fire in my mouth and a hole in my chest. Are you my mother, Thoros?
— George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords
-If I somehow possessed a set of videotapes that contained all the most significant events of your childhood, in their entirety, would you want to see them?-Absolutely. Right this very second.-But why? Don't you think some of the tapes would be very sad?-Most of them, yes. But if I could see them, then I could have them in my brain like regular memories-horrible memories, yes, but regular memories, not sinister little ghosts in my head that pop out of some part of me I don't even know, and take the rest of me away. Do you know what I mean?-I think so, If you have to remeber, you'd rather do it in the front of your brain than in the back.
— Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness
Only two weeks since he had left, and it was already happening. Time, blunting the edges of those sharp memories. Laila bore down mentally. What had he said? It seemed vital, suddenly, that she know.Laila closed her eyes. Concentrated.With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when Laila would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by Tariq's name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion—like the phantom pain of an amputee.Except every once in a long while, when Laila was a grown woman, ironing a shirt or pushing her children on a swing set, something trivial, maybe the warmth of a carpet beneath her feet on a hot day or the curve of a stranger's forehead, would set off a memory of that afternoon together. And it would come rushing back. The spontaneity of it. Their astonishing imprudence...It would flood her, steal her breath.But then it would pass. The moment would pass. Leave her feeling deflated, feeling noting but a vague restlessness.
— Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
Memory changes as a person matures.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves
He can hum the music in his old man's quivering voice, but he prefers it in his head, where it lives on in violins and reedy winds. If he imagines it in rehearsal he can remember every step of his three-minute solo as if he had danced it only yesterday, but he knows, too, that one time, onstage in Berlin, he had not danced it as he had learned it; this much he knows but cannot recreate, could no recreate it even a moment after he had finished dancing it. While dancing he had felt blind to the stage and audience, deaf to the music. He had let his body do what it needed to do, free to expand and contract in space, to soar and spin. So, accordingly, when he tries to remember the way he danced it on stage, he cannot hear the music or feel his feet or get a sense of the audience. He is embryonic, momentarily cut off from the world around him. The three most important minutes of his life, the ones that determined his fate and future, are the three to which he cannot gain access, ever.
— Evan Fallenberg, When We Danced on Water
Hatred can't erase love memories.You need to focus on anything else.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.
— Sue Grafton, O is for Outlaw
This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black -- witch-fires glowing still and red in a great desolation.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Moonlit Road and Other Ghost and Horror Stories
Now we wake up with our memoryand fix our gazes on that which was;whispering sweetness, which once coursed through us,sits silently beside us with loosened hair
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems
Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
— Milan Kundera, Encounter
When he recalls it in later years, he will wonder if he is distorting it, embellishing it, because each time he consciously recalls her, that forms a new memory, a new imprint to be stacked on top of the previous one. He fears that too much handling will make it crumble.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
If you are never frightened, sir, you would never find out what you was made of and what you was capable of doing. You would never become a better man than what you started out being. P'raps this is what you will discover - what you are made of and what you are capable of. And when you finally do remember who you are, p'raps you will find that you have become a better man than he ever was. P'raps he was a man why never ever grew any more once he reached manhood. P'raps he needed to do something drastic like losing his memory so that he could get his life unstuck.
— Mary Balogh, Slightly Sinful
You know some minutes warn you they're going to be mighty short and you'd better take a snapshot of 'em while you can. ("Golden Baby")
— Alice Brown
,,,we forget our good actions only slowly, and in fact never truly forget them.
— Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro
Dipping into the archive is always an interesting, if sometimes unsettling, proposition. It often begins with anxiety, with the fear that the thing you want won't surface. But ultimately the process is a little like tapping into the unconscious, and can bring with it the ambivalent gratification of rediscovering forgotten selves.Rather than making new pictures why can't I just recycle some of these old ones? Claim "found" photographs from among my boxes? And have this gesture signify "resistance to further production/consumption"? (96)
— Moyra Davey, Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays
...here we have the first lesson about the nature of memory: what you wish to forget, you may not be able to. What seems to have died, perhaps is just asleep. On the other hand, sometimes you wish to remember something, and there it stands at the doorway of your consciousness, and refuses to come in. You know you know something, the name of some useless celebrity, perhaps, and yet you cannot fish that name out of your inner aquarium. And this illustrates a critical feature of memory, which resembles, as it turns out, most of the processes in the internal realm: the same cause will regularly yield different, even opposite effects.
— Noam Shpancer, The Good Psychologist
Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves
Ice is most welcome in a cold drink on a hot day.But in the heart of winter, you want a warm hot mug with your favorite soothing brew to keep the chill away.When you don’t have anything warm at hand, even a memory can be a small substitute.Remember a searing look of intimate eyes.Receive the inner fire.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
As she stooped over him, her tears fell upon his forehead.The boy stirred, and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and affection he had never known; as a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or even the mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes that never were, in this life; which vanish like a breath; and which some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have awakened, for no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall them.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can’t even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk.
— Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice‎
It is, I think, the rarest of leisure, hard work mixed with hard pleasure, to refine one's time of deep thought or light regard into the utterly self-absorbed and equally and abundantly outward-seeking shape of the personal essay -- a story comprised of found fact, of analyzed emotion, of fictive memory.
— Barry López, About This Life
We must keep in mind that only a part of memory can be translated into the language-based packets of information people use to tell their life stories to others. Learning to be open to many layers of communication is a fundamental part of getting to know another person's life.
— Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are
I bet you think fellas are the ones to remember a girl -- don't you?"He shook his head hurriedly, that he'd always thought that."Fellas have all the fun 'n she just sees one right after another, so it seems like HE'D remember her, better 'n SHE'D remember him, only it works the other way around. I ain't forgot one single fella, all these years. But I bet there ain't TWO 'd know me from a big of bananas this minute.
— Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning
A memory is made up of pieces of information taken in and processed by the brain in a way that is unique to each individual.
— David    Thomas, Improving Your Memory
I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing; It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.
— Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
For all the way he loved her. Every song had her memory, every rain had her smell, and every girl had her face.
— Akshay Vasu
The instant is not in time -- time is in the instant.
— John Barbour
In spite of the three hours I spent combing over the details, I have, to this day, a very persistent certainty that hidden inside me is the revolting knowledge of days when I wasn't quite myself. I now suspect that my inexplicable bouts of exhaustion are due to the massive effort of keeping those days behind me.
— Tony Burgess, Pontypool Changes Everything
As well as remembering too little, I have seen too much
— Rosie Thomas, Iris & Ruby
The halcyon days of childhood, a time when everything lay open before him, when the most minor episodes could be construed as events and every chance encounter … gave rise to fresh insights.
— Ivan Klíma
[T]his jealousy gave him, if anything, an agreeable chill, as, to the sad Parisian who is leaving Venice behind him to return to France, a last mosquito proves that Italy and summer are still not too remote. But, as a rule, with this particular period of his life from which he was emerging, when he made an effort, if not to remain in it, at least to obtain a clear view of it while he still could, he discovered that already it was too late; he would have liked to glimpse, as though it were a landscape that was about to disappear, that love from which he had departed; but it was so difficult to enter into a state of duality and to present to oneself the lifelike spectacle of a feeling one has ceased to possess, that very soon, the clouds gathering in his brain, he could see nothing at all, abandoned the attempt, took the glasses from his nose and wiped them; and he told himself that he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be time enough later on, and settled back into his corner with the incuriosity, the torpor of the drowsy sleeper in the railway-carriage that is drawing him, he feels, faster and faster out of the country in which he has lived for so long and which he had vowed not to allow to slip away from him without looking out to bid it a last farewell.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
...but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty.
— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Sometimes the things that happen aren't as important as the things you remember.
— Julia Walton, Words on Bathroom Walls
For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.
— Eduardo Galeano, Walking Words
Because with time blocking out the bad, memory is always bound to be a bit naive and stupidly optimistic.
— Guy Delisle, Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China
Thoughts race, as if, in a mind devoid of memory, each idea has too much space to grow and move, to collide with others in a shower of sparks before spinning off into its own distance.
— S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep
A word of warning here. The events as you remember them will never be the same in your memory once you have turned them into a memoir. For years I have worried that if I turn all of my life into literature, I won't have any real life left - just stories about it. And it is a realistic concern: it does happen like that. I am no longer sure I remember how it felt to be twenty and living in Spain after my parents died; my book about it stands now between me and my memories. When I try to think about that time, what comes to mind most readily is what I wrote.
— Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir
The arrow of time obscures memory of both past and future circumstance with innumerable fallacies, the least trivial of which is perception.
— Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable
Dickens writes that an event, "began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Memory works in different ways for everybody. Different capacities, different directions, too. Sometimes memory helps you think, sometimes it impedes. Doesn’t mean it’s good or bad. Probably means it’s no big deal.
— Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes
Memory is this, not the target dead on centerbut the hurt unwept.
— Carlos A. Angeles, A Bruise Of Ashes: Collected Poems
The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.
— Charles Wright
Of what use was memory anyway than as a template for one's most reassuring self-deceptions!
— Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable
There’s no such thing as yesterday, he thought dully. Memory is just today, happening over and over again, stamped indelibly with regret.
— Helen Maryles Shankman
Memory is the mother of the muses, prototype Artist. As a rule picks and highlights what is important, omitting what is accidental or trivial. Occasionally, however, is mistaken as all the other artists. Nevertheless it is what I take as a guide page.
— Frank Harris, My Life and Loves
I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn't find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible.
— Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
Islands of memory begin to rise above the river of his life. At first they are little uncharted islands, rocks just peeping above the surface of the waters. Round about them and behind in the twilight of the dawn stretches the great untroubled sheet of water; then new islands, touched to gold by the sun.
— Romain Rolland, Jean Christophe Vol I
What spares us is memory,” he said. “It’s what makes us worth saving. However low we sink, whatever promise we no longer fulfill, we tell our stories. That’s why you’re so important, Charlie. You’re a guardian of our national memory.
— Frederick Weisel, Teller
I try to clutch onto those last moments in the place that I was born to, but I was so busy *living* them! How was I to know I'd have to capture everything I ever wanted to remember of Eire for the rest of my life?
— Kate McCafferty, Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl
That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad.
— Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead
He who travels much has this advantage over others – that the things he remembers soon become remote, so that in a short time they acquire the vague and poetical quality which is only given to other things by time. He who has not traveled at all has this disadvantage – that all his memories are of things present somewhere, since the places with which all his memories are concerned are present.
— Giacomo Leopardi
When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.
— James Carroll
Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.
— Franklin P. Adams
But seen through a long lens, peacemaking founded on 'forgetting' appears to have a limited lifespan.
— Erna Paris
Sitting in his old schoolroom on the sofa with little cushions on the arms and looking into Natasha's wildly eager eyes, Rostov was carried back into that world of home and childhood which had no meaning for anyone else, but gave him some of the greatest pleasure in his life.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
They'd fallen into an easy routine, the three of them. Breakfast together in the morning, then Hughie would leave for work and she and Nell would get started in the house. Lil found she liked having a second shadow, enjoyed showing Nell things, explaining how they worked and why. Nell was a big one for asking why-why did the sun hide at night, why didn't the fire flames leap out of the gate, why didn't the river get bored and run the other way?-and Lil loved supplying answers, watching as understanding dawned on Nell's little face. For the first time in her life, Lil felt useful, needed, whole.
— Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden
My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.
— Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline
Love is motion Potter love is forward movement but you said yourself the memory reel backward it's all backward with you. You are stuck back there because Potter you don't let yourself move forward your eyes get stuck on things and people.
— Kyle Beachy, The Slide
Still, he was pleased to know that he could recall so much of the play and passed the rest of the journey pleasantly in reciting lines to himself, being careful not to snort.
— Diana Gabaldon, The Scottish Prisoner
This is the worst of our ways of remembering--this tendency to prod the crust of anecdote in the hope of releasing a gush of piping-hot symbolism. 
— Kamila Shamsie, Kartography
Slavery is a memory of something we cannot remember, and yet we cannot forget.
— Bill T. Jones
Memory is not only unruly, leaving us in the lurch when most needed, but stupid as well, putting its nose into places where it is not wanted.
— Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
...early on Monday evening, when the sky was the color of a velvet ribbon falling over the hills.
— Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth
Children would beg for a peppermint drop each time he walked into town, and they'd follow behind, asking for a second and a third. When he died suddenly, while working late at his office, every boy and girl in the village reported smelling mint in the night air, as if somehing sweet had passed them right by.
— Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth
It is in providing outward display for things and pathways as they exist within the horizons of landscape that places enable memories to become inwardly inscribed and possessed: made one with the memorial self. The visibility without becomes part of the invisibility within.
— Edward S. Casey
Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.
— Fern Schumer Chapman, Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past
... I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe—but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual; so it may be that some of these events I describe never occurred at all, but only should have, and that others had not the shades and flavors—for example, of jealousy or antiquity or shame—that I have later unconsciously chosen to give them...
— Gene Wolfe, Peace
I am an old man, and I am dying...Will you remember me, Jacob?"I promise, one day, I will join you, Mr. Gold."Mr. Gold's laughter sounded like a trumpet and brought light to the corners of the room.
— Noah Benshea, Jacob the Baker: Gentle Wisdom For a Complicated World
To lead a human life, a man must have a notion of himself as having a past and a future.
— Mary Warnock, Imagination and Time
...It is only now that memory works both ways. Which of us dreamed it - those from the country of nights five times as warm and as cold, or those who turned away and woke?
— Angele Ellis
Dimly--at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream--she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as as landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past.
— Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space
Sometimes, as a great treat, I was allowed to remove Nursie's snowy ruffled cap. Without it, she somehow retreated into private life and lost her official status. Then, with elaborate care, I would tie a large blue satin ribbon round her head - with enormous difficulty and holding my breath, because tying a bow is no easy matter for a four-year-old. After which I would step back and exclaim in ecstasy: "Oh Nursie, you ARE beautiful!" At which she would smile and say in her gentle voice: "Am I, love?
— Agatha Christie, An Autobiography
But nothing happened there now of a nature to provoke a disturbance. There were no complaints to the management or the police, and the dark glory of the upper galleries was a legend in such memories as that of the late Emiel Kroger and the present Pablo Gonzales, and one by one, of course, those memories died out and the legend died out with them. Places like the Joy Rio and the legends about them make one more than usually aware of the short bloom and the long fading out of things. ("The Mysteries of the Joy Rio")
— Tennessee Williams, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
To remember a man’s name is to give him eternal life
— Bill Gunn
It's often the material things that provide the essence of memory.
— Marjorie Garber
...I had been with my father so constantly for so long that I knew less and less about him with every passing year. Every meaningful image was jumbled together with the countless moments of our daily life defeating my efforts to gain some perspective.
— Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
MY GOD!' read Monte Cristo, 'LET ME KEEP MY MEMORY!
— Alexandre Dumas
Memory, I must suppose, if it is neglected becomes like a box room, or a lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not only from neglect but also from too much haphazard searching in them, and things to boot thrown in that don't belong there.
— Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
You must remind me, little one. When I... when I lose myself - when I lose her - you must remind me that I am still searching, still waiting... that I have never forgotten her, never turned from all she taught me. I sit in this place... I sit... because a king has to sit, you see... but in my mind, in my poor mind, I am always away with her....
— Peter S. Beagle, Two Hearts
Shame was a peculiar beast, Naomi knew. She suspected everyone had it: the dragon they wanted to slay. But for her it was different. Naomi wanted to bathe in it, to stand under its waterfall and come out blessed.
— Rene Denfeld, The Child Finder
Consistent and chronic distractions have the power we give it focal access, to rob us of our long-term historic memory of unhurried moments in life where we are divinely invited to experience that which is the lovely, praiseworthy and excellent...give heed to the call of voices in a song that raises the vibration of a melodic verses, in such a spectacular way, that our neurons create a bio-celluar concert to revive the soul of our best memories. . .selah
— Tracey Bond
Let it be emphasized once more, and especially to anyone inclined to a personally rewarding skepticism in these matters: for practical purposes, the financial memory should be assumed to last, at a maximum, no more than 20 years. This is normally the time it takes for the recollection of one disaster to be erased and for some variant on previous dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It is also the time generally required for a new generation to enter the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own innovative genius.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria
The battle for hearts and minds begins in the field of memory. And in that field, age has no limit.
— Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
How much of this day have you already forgotten?
— Marty Rubin
I told her I was not sure I could bear living with memories, she said, Look up at the stars, look, they are not there, what you see is the memory of what once was, once upon a time.
— Rabih Alameddine, The Angel of History
Some commit slow suicide with the sweet poison of their memories.
— Javier Enríquez Serralde
Does being true to one's self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one's self? It hardly matters by this time. By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corners of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particle, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions - what happened and what might have happened - come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight. Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story.
— Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Leaving Brooklyn
What you don't know by heart you haven't really loved deeply enough
— George Steiner
I long for a place that exists only in my memory –a cheery spot where my heart is happy and myspirit is free.
— Peggy Toney Horton
He blurred his thens and his nows—in a fantastic drunken distortion—with the thisness and thenness of now and before, re-spectively; wisps of Bburke with Jane infiltrated him without her, the way dry oars still taste of salt. And it made Bburke trace Jane’s silhouette in his bedsheets with his lips, wondering if his sadness and loneliness was of any import to the grander human comedy, like the swooning soul of Joyce’s Gabriel, lost amidst a universe of snow—because, in small, unnoticeable ways, must not the sea taste of oars?
— A.J.      Smith, Growth
perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poemfrom the last years of her life that begins"I lose my screams"dear Antigone,I take it as the task of the translatorto forbid that you should ever lose your screams
— Anne Carson, Antigonick
[In] everyday life, it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never challenged. They can, instead, be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are, or become a work in continual artistic revision.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
For some reason I think of the first time I saw her, kicking the shit out of the vending machine that refused to release her candy. Before that day, every hour of my life had been exactly like the one before it. Relentlessly boring. Painfully monotonous. But then she walked out of my waking nightmare and into my life, a complete mystery from Second One. Her presence was a problem I needed to solve, a problem that finally interested me. And then, somehow, she made me interested in myself. Mara began as a question I needed to answer, but the longer I'd known her, the less I felt I actually knew. She was constantly surprising, infinitely complex. Unknowable. Unpredictable. I have never met anyone more fascinating in my life, and all the time in the world wouldn't be enough to ever know her.
— Michelle Hodkin, The Retribution of Mara Dyer
When you’re finally finished crying, I hope you run as fast and as far as you possibly can from me. When you land, out of breath, and I’m finally out of sight, finally out of mind, you’ll be honestly fine. All wounds will be healed. All fires will be extinguished. I’ll be a memory. Feel free to repress me.
— Kris Kidd, Return to Sender
Repression is dangerous. It makes anvils of memories and drops them from impossible heights when you least expect it.
— Kris Kidd, Return to Sender
I'm prepared now to use the wonderful word confluence, which of itself exists as a reality and a symbol in one. It is the only kind of symbol that for me as a writer had any weight, testifying to the pattern, one of the chief patterns, of human experience. Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memory - the individual human memory. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. Here time, also, is subject to confluence. The memory is a living thing - it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives - the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing