c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The music of life would be mute if the chords of memory were snapped asunder.
— Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
You’re always making up stuff from the past,” she said. “And the stuff you imagine is always better than the stuff that actually happened.
— Sherman Alexie, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me
How did I picture the life after the grave? I fairly bawled out at him: "A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.
— Albert Camus, The Stranger
Like a great ship, this season has run aground. Dawn and dusk alternate at an old man's pace. I live alone in an area known as the 'Waterside', writing a book akin to the Revelations of St. John.
— Ge Fei, Flock of Brown Birds
Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths off memory's laminated floor?
— Viet Thanh Nguyen
I don't remember things. I black out and I can't remember where I've been or what I've done. Sometimes I wonder if I've done or said terrible things, and I can't remember. And if...if someone tells me something I've done, it doesn't even feel like me. it doesn't feel like it was me who was doing that thing. And it's so hard to feel responsible for something you don't remember. So I never feel bad enough. i feel bad, but the thing that i've done --it's removed from me. It's like it doesn't belong to me.
— Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train
I can tell you this: there will be other girls, other disasters. And there will be nights to come, his life mostly behind him, when he will long to hurt like that again.
— Michael Knight, Eveningland: Stories
A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came.
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
If I don't talk about it, it's either very displeasing or very precious to me.
— Joyce Rachelle
When I first began to write, I had been a child for most of my life, and my childhood memories were vivid and potent, and the forces that shaped me, Most of them have grown fainter with time, and whenever I write one down, I give it away: it ceases to have the shadowy life of memory and becomes fixed in letters: it ceases to be mine; it loses that mobile unreliability of the live.
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
In this city of loveYour memories tinkle like an anklet My heart rhymes melodies to its tune And affection shines like a droplet
— Neelam Saxena Chandra
What at one time one refuses to see never vanishes but returns, again and again, in many forms.
— Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
Remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness)
— Grace Paley, Just As I Thought
We should kill our pasts with each passing day. Blot them out, so that they will not hurt. Each present day could thus be endured more easily, it would not be measured against what no longer exists. As things our, spectres mix with our lives so that there is neither pure memory nor pure life. They clash and try to strangle each other, continually.
— Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish
This time of year, the purple blooms were busy with life- not just the bees, but butterflies and ladybugs, skippers and emerald-toned beetles, flitting hummingbirds and sapphire dragonflies. The sun-warmed sweet haze of the blossoms filled the air."When I was a kid," said Isabel, "I used to capture butterflies, but I was afraid of the bees. I'm getting over that, though." The bees softly rose and hovered over the flowers, their steady hum oddly soothing. The quiet buzzing was the soundtrack of her girlhood summers. Even now, she could close her eyes and remember her walks with Bubbie, and how they would net a monarch or swallowtail butterfly, studying the creature in a big clear jar before setting it free again. They always set them free.As she watched the activity in the hedge, a memory floated up from the past- Bubbie, gently explaining to Isabel why they needed to open the jar. "No creature should ever be trapped against its will," she used to say. "It will ruin itself, just trying to escape." As a survivor of a concentration camp, Bubbie only ever spoke of the experience in the most oblique of terms.
— Susan Wiggs, The Beekeeper's Ball
The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it--whether it cripples the mind's power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness.
— Maggie Nelson, Bluets
And because I found it in my youth, the bar was that much more sacred, its image clouded by that special reverence children accord those places where they feel safe. Others might feel this way about a classroom or playground, a theater or church, a laboratory or library or stadium. Even a home. But none of these places claimed me. We exalt what is at hand. Had I grown up beside a river or an ocean, some natural avenue of self-discovery and escape, I might have mythologized it. Instead I grew up 142 steps from a glorious old American tavern, and that has made all the difference.
— J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar
Then he remembered his wedding, the old times, the first pregnancy of his wife; he, too, had been very happy the day when he had taken her from her father to his home, and had carried her off on a pillion, trotting through the snow, for it was near Christmas-time, and the country was all white. She held him by one arm, her basket hanging from the other; the wind blew the long lace of her Cauchois headdress so that it sometimes flapped across his mouth, and when he turned his head he saw near him, on his shoulder, her little rosy face, smiling silently under the gold bands of her cap. To warm her hands she put them from time to time in his breast. How long ago it all was! Their son would have been thirty by now. Then he looked back and saw nothing on the road.
— Gustave Flaubert
We only reach true wisdom when we accept that we have almost certainly forgotten more than we currently remember.
— Ian M. Bates, Tardrew : a history of the Tardrew family around the world
As long as there is love and memory, there is no true death," - John Carstairs
— Cassandra Clare, Lady Midnight
Sometimes the good memories are just as painful as the bad ones.
— Emory R. Frie, Neverland
…this is the problem with photographs. After a while, you can’t remember if you’re recalling the actual memory or the memory of the photograph. Or perhaps the photograph is the only reason you remember that moment. (p.85)
— Michael Zadoorian, The Leisure Seeker
In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.
— Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow
In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness.How very clean.Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.
— Minae Mizumura, Inheritance from Mother
I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
— Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow
He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible.
— Milan Kundera, Ignorance
How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mr Death?
— E.E. Cummings
WheneverI look backTo the artOnce I cravedI wanna punchSquare in faceIf only I'm allowedTo do so...
— Irfa Rahat
The storms inside uncoilinto sky held calm by far seeing eyesMemories dressed in the translucenttrickery of the mind,so as to wear life upon themselves,give up their tired dance and runinto free frequency
— Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides
And he'd said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled.
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing
I knew that sunny citrus helped put things in focus, sharpened the memory, just like a squeeze of lemon juice could sharpen and clarify the taste of sweet fruit. I was also well aware that too much citrus could indicate a corrosive anger. My first wedding at Rainbow Cake had taught me that. But this was a gentle, subdued citrus, like the taste of a Meyer lemon.Spice usually indicated grief, a loss that lingered for a long time, just like the pungent flavor of the spice itself, whether it was nutmeg or allspice or star anise. The more pronounced the flavor, the more recent the loss and the stronger the emotion. So there was some kind of loss or remembrance involved here. Yet there was also a comfort in the remembering, knowing that people had gone before you. That they waited for you on the other side.
— Judith Fertig, The Memory of Lemon
I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a signboard had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles—no matter the imminent peril—these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
Lately, I couldn't remember those years, as if childhood was a movie I'd only seen the previews to.
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing
The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to becomeerased as the years go by, but often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features. Judges know this very well: almost never do two eyewitnesses of the same event describe it in the same way and with the same words, even if the event is recent and if neither of them has a personal interest in distorting it.
— Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
The last slide is Main Street at night, with the castle lit silver blue in the background. In the sky, fireworks are going off, cresting, cracking open the darkness, shooting long tendrils of colored light down to the buildings, way longer than I’ve ever seen for fireworks… I linger on this slide. I study that blue castle and those fireworks and realize that this is the image I’ve had in my head of Disneyland for all these years. Just like the beginning of the Wonderful World of Disney TV show. Maybe that’s why I wanted to head here this time. I know it’s ridiculous, but part of me wants to think that the world after this one could look like that.Like I said before, I stopped having notions about religion and heaven long ago—angels and harps and clouds and all that malarkey. Yet some silly, childish side of me still wants to believe in something like this. A gleaming world of energy and light, where nothing is quite the same color as it is on earth—everything bluer, greener, redder. Or maybe we just become the colors, that light spilling from the sky over the castle. Perhaps it would be somewhere we’ve already been, the place we were before we were born, so dying is simply a return. I guess is that were true then somehow we’d remember it. Maybe that’s what I’m doing with this whole trip—looking for somewhere that I remember, deep in some crevice of my soul. Who knows? Maybe Disneyland is heaven. Isn’t that the damnedest, craziest thing you’ve ever heard? Must be the dope talking.(pp.253-254)
— Michael Zadoorian, The Leisure Seeker
We live in a world of disposable memory, nothing's built to last, not even shame.
— Dennis Lehane, Since We Fell
You'd think hindsight would do us some goodBut all it does sometimesIs add glass to the kaleidoscope
— J.D. Estrada, Black Tie Affair
A jewelry box? Ballerinas? She'd been such an active girl that any jewelry she'd been given would have been lost or broken right away. It was Faye Marie who'd loved-"My sister," she gasped, then louder. "My sister!" She clasped her hands together in a pleading gesture. "My lord, I beg pardon of you, but you're mistaken. I believe you gifted that treasure box to my older sister, Faye Marie. She's the one who loved ballerinas. I was obsessed with-""Pegasus." The old justice's eyes melted from cold to kindness. "It was a trick question. I'd forgotten your birthday was so close to mine, and shared my spice cake out of pure guilt." His lined face wrinkled as he smiled with a fond memory. "You were a kind little soul, unspoiled for a girl raised in such wealth. You forgave me instantly and informed me that spice cake was, indeed, your favorite present ever received.
— Kerrigan Byrne, The Highwayman
It was a time when she did not have the words to name things she saw, and so now, when she tried to recall them, the words could never be right.
— Scott Cawthon, Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes
Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breedsAlong the pebbled shore of memory!Many old rotten-timber'd boats there beUpon thy vaporous bosom, magnifiedTo goodly vessels; many a sail of pride,And golden keel'd, is left unlaunch'd and dry.
— John Keats, Endymion: A Poetic Romance
It is a political fight between a group of well-financed, well-organized people whose freedom, livelihood, finances, reputations, or liberty is being threatened by disclosures of child sexual abuse and--on the other hand--a group of well-meaning, ill-organized, underfinanced, and often terribly naive academics who expect fair play.
— Anna C. Salter
Memory lane is not a road I like to go down. But that's the only way to remember not to forget.
— Manasa Rao, Love was just a word
We communed together a moment, one with the other—I was deeply fascinated. At our first encounter I am sure I had a nebulous presentiment that I would one day go to it in spite of my hesitation, in spite of all the efforts put forth to hold me back,—and the emotion that overwhelmed me in the presence of the sea was not only one of fear, but I felt also an inexpressible sadness, and I seemed to feel the anguish of desolation, bereavement and exile. With downcast mien, and with hair blown about by the wind, I turned and ran home. I was in the extreme haste to be with my mother; I wished to embrace her and to cling close to her; I desired to be with her so that she might console me for the thousand indefinite, anticipated sorrows that surged through my heart at the sight of those green waters, so vast and so deep.
— Pierre Loti, The Story of a Child
IT TOOK a conscious effort for Tallow to keep his hand off his gun as he walked up the apartment building’s stairs. There was no threat here. He told himself that with every step. But every step held memory.
— Warren Ellis, Gun Machine
How do you write a memory? For that matter, what is a memory? A remembrance, a dream of the past that floats into the present on occasion? What are memories? Are they illusion? For if memory is illusion, then how can we be sure of what is real? Illusions are fabricated, sometimes they are an accident, sometimes they are pure deception, and how do we tell the difference? Do you start with the person? Do you start with the idea? How can you begin with either if you can’t decide on one? How can you write a memory if you don’t even know what it is? How do you create something that has never before been created? If we don’t know what our memories are, do we know what the present is? Do we know what the future holds? If we don’t know what memories are then do we know what the past was? And if we question what we know, how can we be sure of anything? How can we be sure what’s currently happening is real, and not a vivid memory being relived over and over in painful remembrance?
— Stephen  Vaughn, M.I.N.D.
A lifetime of memories does not provide empirical proof of the value of living. No one memory has a quantifiable value to anyone expect the holder of the memory. Parenting in large part consists of creating positive memories for children. An accumulation of a lifetime of memories does create a musical score that we can assess from an artistic if not scientific perspective. Each happy memory generates a beat of minor joy that when strung together form the musical notes demarking a person’s prosodic inner tune.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
I have always wished the present to resemble memory: because the present can be flat at times, and bald as a road. But memory is never like that. It makes hills of feeling in collapsed hours, a scene of enclosure made all precious by its frame.
— Lydia Millet, My Happy Life
What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
My memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, bring on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don't know. I never would have said I didn't like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don't alter my memory of that place.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
Darkness just loosens the mask. Sharpens the mind's eye. Makes the color of a remembered pencil, or a tick of waxy red on a cracked plaster wall, as vivid as that taillight a few feet away.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
Without memory, they were lost. And nobody wanted someone they loved to be lost.
— Cassandra Clare, Welcome to Shadowhunter Academy
Today was very full, but the problem isn't today. It's tomorrow. I'd be able to recover from today if it weren't for tomorrow. There should be extra days, buffer days, between real days.
— Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
He’s completely blown through his younger years like his childhood was one big cigarette to smoke carelessly.
— Rebecca McNutt, Hello, My Name is Grief: A Short Story About 9/11
Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement - as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements. Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary...
— Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa
Maybe I got a few words wrong, but that's so near how the conversation went, I'm going to call it truth.
— Shannon Hale, Book of a Thousand Days
We can free ourselves from the old stories that have reduced us & allow real love for ourselves to blossom.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The best way to be resurrected is to be forgotten.
— Loren Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid
Poetry lit fire in the vast forest of memories within you.
— TRIPURARI
Each time, we ask, "Who am I?", we answer the question differently. Our identity evolves, as it is the sum of our thoughts, words and deeds. To be ourselves, we have to remember ourselves, which makes our very identity conditional. Each time we remember, we reaffirm our individuality. Our existence as an independent person depends on it, but we don't exist as self-enclosed units of matter. Who we are cannot be remembered or forgotten. Our identity, as we perceive it, only appears in consciousness. Underneath, it exists in a thoughtless, wordless awareness, in which there is no "We" or "I", just an "Amness"...simply an indescribable sense of being.
— Anita B. Sulser PhD, We Are One
Memory: Recognizing the value of an alert mind and an alert memory, I will encourage mine to become alert by taking care to impress it clearly with all thoughts I wish to recall and by associating those thoughts with related subjects which I may call to mind frequently.
— Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee — Wisdom for the Way
Every key belongs to a lock, and every lock contains a secret. My mind churns for the truth that you hold. Why are you here? I never desired this for you, yet I am curious to know. Is this idle gaud the answer I seek, or is it merely the old memory of a dream I thought I once lived?
— H.S. Crow, Lunora and the Monster King
Memory may be pig-headed and want us to follow its whims along the blips and dips of our time line. ( "All the words he always wanted to tell her.")
— Erik Pevernagie
Dementia: Is it more painful to forget, or to be forgotten?
— Joyce Rachelle
Without the mellifluous notes of memory, there would be no songs to sing, no ballads dedicated to past afflictions or affections, and no church hymns celebrating the trials and tribulations of saints, martyrs, and holy deities. Without respect for memories for days gone by, we would lack impetuses to write poems or produce literature reflecting the bitter hardships and ineffable joys of human life. Without a reference to the past serving as an ethical compass pointing the way forward, we would be oblivious to the inequities committed by foes and the glorious deeds performed by our ancestors; we would lack the essential evenhandedness required of every caretaker; and we would be poor stewards of this planet. The loss of memory severs us at the stem from one another. Without the bond of shared memories, we would each remain forever unconnected to our brothers and sisters. Without the twigs of memory, we would lead a life as dry and disjointed as withered leaves scattered by a cruel wind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We came from some place and we are trending in a particular direction. Without memories, we do not know where we come from, and we cannot project our future trajectory. Without a keen awareness of our history, we cannot pose any meaningful hypothesis or engage in any useful speculation regarding the future of humankind. Without knowing where humankind came from and failing to contemplate where humankind is going, we could never touch upon a comprehensive understanding of the mythology and mystery of human nature. Such a spectacle would preclude us from comprehending what it truly means to be human. Melodious memories assist us to feel in our bones what being actually entails in its full aesthetic splendor.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Human beings are self-motivated. The two desires that spur human action are hunger and love. Without memory, humankind would no longer hunger for love.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
This is not a lie: Memory has the taste and texture of cooked meat. Eat it and live. Remember, but only what it is licit to remember.In Aerograd, the word for meat and memory are the same.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Bread We Eat in Dreams
There can be no intellectual, spiritual, or emotional life without the substratum of memory. Without cognition and awareness of beauty and appreciation of our limited time on planet Earth, humankind’s sojourn would be a colorless collage composed of the base acts of a biological mass endeavoring merely to survive. Without the ability to recall striking memories, our emotional life would be stillborn. Absent authentic memories, our life struggles would seem purposeless: human beings would exhibit no capacity to reflect awe when witnessing the bounty of nature’s plenitude or be able to take in and express intense reverence for all that is sacred. Without memory, there would not be a dais to support faith or any ability to imagine a God; the concepts of good and evil would be nonexistent; and the past and the future would become less relevant than the choice between salt or pepper, and paper or plastic.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
No person is more ruthlessly cheated than someone strip-mined of his or her ability to recall the vibrancy of the past. After all, what would any person be if robbed of all sense of long-term memory? Without memories, all that any person would know about life is if he or she was hungry or thirsty, cold or hot. Without memories of the past and shredded of any illusion of a future there cannot be a frame for our existence. Without a sense of memory, we lack cognition of the very essence of our being. In absence of our memories, there can be no introspection, no ethical awareness, and no devotion, loyalty, or love.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Is this neuro-bot really supposed to be her, this creature, this thing, compiled of the ghosts of human data, the replicas of their past?
— Bremer Acosta, Blood of Other Worlds
When I was very little, my mother used to say there was something of my grandmother in me, in how I tell stories the way I need them to be and not the way they actually happened.
— Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
Do you know that I can't remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.''Don't you have a photograph?''Photographs!' He spat out the word. 'I'm talking about true recollection - seeing the face.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold
In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold
I have woken up inside one of my own memories. I am really here, yet I know I am not.
— Emily Barr, The One Memory of Flora Banks
You’re not the same. You’re not supposed to be the same. You’re supposed to be different. This isn’t something you will ever forget.
— Daisy Whitney, The Rivals
Their house was about a mile outside of town. The kids would play outdoors, in the backyard and the large stubble field behind the house. Dusk seemed to last for hours, and when it was finally dark they would sit under the porch light, catching thickly buzzing June bugs and moths, or even an occasional toad who hopped into the circle of light, tempted by the halo of insects that floated around the bare orange lightbulb next to the front door
— Dan Chaon, Ill Will
We realize, though, because we must, that remembrance is finite. It crosses only so many generations before it fades to indistinction. One man remembers his father and perhaps his grandfather and the details of the lives that were lived. But it's harder to see further back in time. I know the name of my great-grandfather, but our living time did not intersect. We did not walk the earth at the same time. Thus, to me he's a photograph; a story I heard my grandfather tell. He's not a life I remember. And my children may not know him at all, unless by chance they can find him in a book. In time, he will be forgotten entirely, just as we all will with enough revolutions of the earth around the slowly expiring sun. Each fragile heart now beating will one day stop ... We are little more than one tree's growth of leaves in hillside forest. We will enjoy our brief moment in the sun, only to fall away with all the other to make way for the next bright young generation.
— Phillip Lewis, The Barrowfields
Our memories are like a city: we tear some structures down, and we use the rubble of the old to raise up the new ones.
— Tom Pollock, The City's Son
The past and present are after all so close, almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.
— Iris Murdoch
Recalling former years’ romances,Recalling love that time enhances,With tenderness, with not a care,Alive, at liberty once more,We drank, in mute intoxication,The breath of the indulgent night!Just as a sleepy convict mightBe carried from incarcerationInto a greenwood, so were weBorne to our youth by reverie.
— Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business. Prior to this first weekend in the country, my recollections of that fall are distant and blurry: from here on out, they come into a sharp, delightful focus. It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, would wear entirely off - though their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be - but it is here, in my memory, that they cease being totally foreign and being to appear, for the first time, in shapes very like their bright old selves.I too appear as something of a stranger in these early memories.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
My body shakes with a million different fires. Feet that look like yours warp and the corns split so you see craters of infinite variety, some pus-filled Lake Toba. The weakness in my limbs, the thick weight on my head and chest and the slow burning inside me that never reaches the skin, bring me closer to you. My afflictions bring me closer to you.
— Jinat Rehana Begum, First Fires
In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody’s memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory, some memories are lost by the passage of time, psychological defense mechanisms screen other memories from detection, the ephemeral character of other memories are invariably to elusive to arrest with reciprocal language.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Great moment, great memory.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Memory is a time capsule
—  it records the wounds inflicted upon human consciousness.
Our most potent memories include the taste and smells of foods we enjoyed as a child in part because it reminds us of who fed us a meal.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life is merely a series of moments and is in fact an unflinching serial killer, since it kills steadily each moment one after the other. Memory is the only survivor. (“Just for a moment”)
— Erik Pevernagie
It is the touch of a lover's arms that I so desperately crave, not the memories of a love no longer mine.
— D.S. Mixell
I would far prefer to be in someone's arms than just in their head.
— D.S. Mixell
The first time he saw her she reminded him of a distant memory of falling from a height.
— Vatsal Surti, On Love
The memories of walks...are hitched on to particular times and places
—  they spontaneously form a kind of calendar or connecting thread upon which other memories may be strung...The author is but the accidental appendage of the tramp.
I pass a construction site, abandoned for the night, and a few blocks later, the playground of the elementary school my son attended, the metal sliding board gleaming under a streetlamp and the swings stirring in the breeze. There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead o me. It's the beautiful thing about youth.There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential. I love my life, but I haven't felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get.
— Blake Crouch, Dark Matter
We are so afraid of being pulled under the water with the anchor. Scared of letting these memories swirl around our mind as they should. As tragic as it might feel, it’s evident that the sea we are drowning in is the same sea we were born into.
— Trevor J. Freeman
The thing is, memory is about trust. We have to trust that what we remember is fact. And we have to trust what other people remember for things we never saw.
— James Renner, The Great Forgetting
The power of collective memory does not lie in its accurate, systematic, or sophisticated mapping of the past, but in establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance.
— Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition
[“What is the most real thing you can think of?”]Jacques thought for a long time before answering; he tried to weigh up what was most vital and enduring in all that he had known. Eventually, no longer smiling, he said, ‘Memory’.
— Sebastian Faulks, Human Traces
I began keeping diaries after they locked Rosemary up at Butler and I went to live with Aunt Elaine in Cranston until I was eighteen, but even the diaries can't be trusted. For instance, there's a series of entries describing a trip to New Brunswick that I'm pretty sure I never took. It used to scare me, those recollections of things that never took place, but I've gotten used to it.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl
There is magic just outside our memory.
— Suzka, Wonders in Dementialand
Violet unwrapped everything old as if it were a ribboned gift given to her by the Gods.
— Suzka, Wonders in Dementialand
My mother had a way of accessing the energy of the people around her. There was no need to know their name, who they were or how she knew them. She didn’t recognize their surface. She went much deeper.
— Suzka, Wonders in Dementialand
This woman had no idea who I was. She has no idea I was once a smoker, was thrown out of boarding school twice and a certified rebel with strong opinions. To her, I was new, fresh, immaculate to the bone. This was all strangely wonderful.
— Suzka, Wonders in Dementialand
The apparent is never the real.
— Charles O. Slavens
Poetry is a hook for memory
— Gillian Clarke, At the Source: A Writer's Year
After Abalyn said what she said, I panicked. Someone tells me I can't remember what I definitely do remember, and sometimes I panic. I'm not as used to it as I often pretend. As I pretend to be used to it, I mean to say. The false memories.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl
These things were in the past now, many long years ago, though the memory remained as solid and present as his heartbeats. Time's passage had made the events seem almost crazed, hyper-real, stretched across a surreal dreamscape that felt more like a skjald's embellished saga than the intact past. Perhaps it had not happened like that. Perhaps the Lion had taken his Stormbirds to the Tyrant's fortress, and he himself had teleported in. Perhaps it had not been Ogvai there, but Gunn, or someone else. Had Bjorn been there too? It was a long time ago, so doubtful, but Bjorn seemed to always have been there, right from the start, just waiting for his time to come to maturity.
— Chris Wraight, Leman Russ: The Great Wolf
Memory was a slippery thing—slick moss on an unstable slope—and it was ever so easy to lose one’s footing and fall
— Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon
Departure of a year welcomes so many new memories
— Munia Khan
We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places -- retreated to most often when we are most remote from them -- are among the most important landscapes we possess.
— Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
What was the exact percentage of this day that had already slipped away?
— Tara Altebrando, The Leaving
People who were gone only lived on in your memory if you had memories. Why hadn't she held on tighter?
— Tara Altebrando, The Leaving
Something weird moved through me, a feeling of familiarity, and as I stood in front of my locker, I found myself thinking of the one bright thing in a past full of shadows and darkness.I thought about the boy who made my chest hurt, the one who’d promised forever.It had been four years since I’d seen him or even heard him speak. Four years of trying to erase everything that had to do with that portion of my childhood, but I remembered him. I wondered about him.How could I not? I always would.He had been the sole reason I survived the house we’d grown up in.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, The Problem with Forever
Celebrate the gift of memory.
— Harley King
This seems to me absolutely one of the quintessential things about the human condition. It’s what actually distinguishes man from any other animal: living with those who have lived and the companionship of those who are no longer alive. Not necessarily the people that one knew personally, I mean the people perhaps whom one only knows by what they did, or what they left behind, this question of the company of the past, that’s what interests me, and archives are a kind of site in the sense of like an archaeological site.
— John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists
I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Life, he knew, had meaning and was fully possessed only as it was remembered and reshaped.
— Jane Hamilton, The Short History of a Prince
Your memories are like the air I breathe. I don't have to keep checking on it every now and then to make sure whether I am doing it or not. It happens all by itself. But the moment I try to stop it and hold it back forcefully, I start craving for it more and before I could even know I will be fighting to get more of it so that I could survive.
— Akshay Vasu
Once she was gone, every memory was suddenly precious, even the bad ones, even the times I was irritated with her, or she was irritated with me. Then it seemed a luxury to be irritated.
— Lydia Davis, Can't and Won't: Stories
You broke the chain, Luna. Of all his victims, you were the only one that ever walked away and he hasn’t forgotten.
— Kayla Krantz, Survive at Midnight
We ourselves, will resurrect the memory in order to savor it and carry it forth into the world. We will fling it at one another for laughs. Distort it. We will toss the story into the air at parties and howl over its ripeness. Degraded as it was, we will degrade it further. Make it more swollen. We shall render it impossibly awful, making of it the mythology of ourselves. A comfort. Proof of the trials we've survived.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread
Just as he lived with them alive, he will live with them dead. Someday he will accept their death as part of his life. He will weep no more. He will carry them in his memory and his thoughts. His flesh and blood are part of them. So long as he is alive, they, too, will live in him. The big wave came, but it went away. The sun shines again, birds sing, and earth flowers.
— Pearl S. Buck, The Big Wave
We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember.
— Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?
I write to prove that we lived. I write both to remember and to let go. I write because I can't stop, not until this horrible story of ours is over and we're safe at home.
— Courtney M. Privett, Cavelost
The more emotional you are in a situation, the more memories you’ll have of that situation in the long run.
— Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?
The whole composition reminds him of something he once had and that he isn't sure if he misses. He does and he doesn't at the same time. It is less the melancholy memory of an abscence and more the comforting evidence that it exists and is still part of the world.
— Daniel Galera, Barba Ensopada de Sangue
you are on track, keep doin the things in your life that leaves the memories replenished, and with those things and the people who support a kind and just heart, life is short but oh yes it is remarkable to work at allowing it to be a part of this life I say this with our mutual love of friends and family..
— levi paul taylor
The weapon of memory, turned on the self, is an apocalyptic sword.
— Josephine Hart, The truth about love
He felt his heart was going to explode, his body burned while his mind tried to reconstitute the ashes of who he once had been.
— Jorge Silva Rodighiero, Sacrifice
I want to know what's wrong with loving someone for life? Even when they're dead? What exactly is wrong with that? Why should I put him away, out of my mind? Like he's out of fashion. Does no one love for ever any more? Is no one built for the long road?
— Josephine Hart, The truth about love
it's hard to find time to think about Kansas.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
There is a magic in distance. Look back at the golden lamp-lit rooms of your home from the road of your life, and it all for a moment is exactly how you hoped it would be: warm, peaceful, safe.
— Kate Lord Brown, The Taste of Summer
Where would we be without it, memory? Well, it'll never die here. Never in this country. We feed it too well.
— Josephine Hart, The truth about love
Life is made of MOMENTS. From the beginning to the end of EXISTENCE. But not everything that happens to BE necessarily one day will lose its title. Time has the PRIVILEGE to create and destroy, but above all, to ETERNIZE. Time has the power to promote meetings, disagreements, but mainly TEACHING. Influence in the most desperate situations as in the most beautiful MEMORY. Time is loss, but it is CURE. It is the second of birth and the whole LIFE. Time is lord! But like every sovereign, it is only when there is something that proposes such a position. Time with us can be EVERYTHING, but without reason, can be nothing. Then he becomes righteous, RECIPROCAL, respect and him will respects you. Embrace the time! Give your hand for a moment, one with yourself! Make "the sense" HAPPEN in your favor! Just WANT! The beginning of everything is the time, but for the most OUTSTANDING events, the WILL was indispensable! THINK, even for 1 minute!
— 1 Minuto na Palma da Mão
The human brain has a marvelous capacity to screen and sort experience, protecting itself against the unbearable.
— Rick Yancey, The Last Star
The graveyard is not the final resting place of our dear departed but an ephemeral repository of their remains. The real graveyard, however, is somewhere deep in our heart, where we can always visit them at any time of the day, talk about some unforgettable summers, or cry in solitude as if they were always there for us to stay. And should our twilight come, when we can no longer see the light of the day, some people dear to us will build a graveyard in their hearts. They will let us stay for a while or perhaps longer, as long as they continue to remember, but it does not matter anymore. What is comforting to know, no matter how tragic or tranquil our death may be, somewhere somehow someone will always build a sublime place for us to stay. (Danny Castillones Sillada, The Graveyard In Our Heart)
— Danny Castillones Sillada
But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory... Everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion - it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.
— Albert Camus, A Happy Death
I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. And great fatigue followed by a good night's rest can to a certain extent help us to do so. For in order to make us descend into the most subterranean galleries of sleep, where no reflexion from overnight, no gleam of memory comes to light up the interior monologue—if the latter does not itself cease—fatigue followed by rest will so thoroughly turn over the soil and penetrate the bedrock of our bodies that we discover down there, where our muscles plunge and twist in their ramifications and breathe in new life, the garden where we played in our childhood. There is no need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. What once covered the earth is no longer above but beneath it; a mere excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city: excavation is necessary also. But we shall see how certain fugitive and fortuitous impressions carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal flight, than these organic dislocations.
— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way
The fact is that I hate this city. I've hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it.
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
All of a sudden, images from every crime movie I'd ever seen began to pop into my mind—the windowless room, the harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
I lived here once," the author said after a moment."Here? For a long time?""No. For just a little while when I was young.""It must have been rather cramped.""I didn't notice.""Would you like to try it again?""No. And I couldn't if I wanted to."He shivered slightly and closed the windows. As they went downstairs, the visitor said, half apologetically: "It's really just like all houses, isn't it?"The author nodded."I didn't think it was when I built it, but in the end I suppose it's just like other houses after all.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography
The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Memories of one's past are tainted. There are no truths to be found in them.
— Morgan Rhodes, The Darkest Magic
I wish nights like this weren't so fragile and slippery and impossible to nail down for study in one's leisure. But the really great nights pass through you like whispers or shadows. They shimmer, but don't adhere.
— Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life