c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Dave once asked me what blind people dream about. Mostly in sound and feeling, I replied. At night I fall in love with a voice, and then wake to a feeling of physical loss. Sometimes I close my eyes to a chorus of “Happy Birthday!” The smell of cake and the sound of feet under the table. I awake in a body that’s too big. I also dream in motion and sensation. My father’s boat and the snore of the mast; the rough fabric of the safety harness and the rip of Velcro. The sun on my legs. And endless stretch of water impossible to imagine.
— Simon Van Booy, The Illusion of Separateness
We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges
I remembered during puberty, through the anorexic mists of intermittent menstrual cycles, that man, my father, lifting Shirley's nightdress over her head and asking her in his mocking way to choose what colour condom she wanted. 'Red or yellow?' Which did she choose? I can't remember. Perhaps she alternated. Perhaps there were other colours. It didn't happen once. It happened again and again. I had no power to stop it. That man, my father, had some control over me. I was drugged by the black silence in that big house, the vile whiff of aftershave, the crushing torment of inevitability. My father fucked Shirley using red or yellow condoms and it was those condoms that brought it all to an end. It was my last realization of the day; any more would have been too much to contemplate. That time when my mother had found used condoms in bedroom, he had admitted, after a pointless burst my father's of denial, that he had been going to prostitutes. That was no doubt true but I can't imagine clients take used condoms away with them; prostitutes would surely get rid of the things. No. My father kept those used condoms as a prize. He was fucking his fourteen-year-old-daughter. He was proud of it. Rebecca welled up with tears. Poor thing, she kept saying. Poor thing.
— Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
Afterwards Isabelle often wondered if the moments themselves were greater or the memory of them. At least the memory did not pass, while the moments passed all too fast. Life whizzed by; she no longer had time to recollect it. Her notebooks to this day retain the story of her desperate attempt to hold together her self, her mind, her reason, her order, her morals.
— Toni Bentley, Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal
88% of what we call good songs aren’t really good. They merely remind us of a good time we once had.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There, there, best to bring it all up,' she said. My memory was in shreds. Imagine a photograph cut into narrow strips then jumbled up. Everything is there, but you can't see the whole picture and even the strips have no bearing on reality. I did know I had consumed a large amount of alcohol. But I must have done something crazier than just being found drunk to have a nurse sitting by my bed. I thought it would be a good idea to say something and planned it for several seconds. 'She's all right,' I said. 'Who is?' asked the nurse. 'Alice. I'm all right now.' As I spoke I wondered if I had said something wrong. didn't sound like me. There were so many voices muttering in the background it was hard to tell.
— Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
Memories rob us of the present.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
For many years there have been rumours of mind control experiments. in the United States. In the early 1970s, the first of the declassified information was obtained by author John Marks for his pioneering work, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate. Over time retired or disillusioned CIA agents and contract employees have broken the oath of secrecy to reveal small portions of their clandestine work. In addition, some research work subcontracted to university researchers has been found to have been underwritten and directed by the CIA. There were 'terminal experiments' in Canada's McGill University and less dramatic but equally wayward programmes at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan and numerous other institutions. Many times the money went through foundations that were fronts or the CIA. In most instances, only the lead researcher was aware who his or her real benefactor was, though the individual was not always told the ultimate use for the information being gleaned. In 1991, when the United States finally signed the 1964 Helsinki Accords that forbids such practices, any of the programmes overseen by the intelligence community involving children were to come to an end. However, a source recently conveyed to us that such programmes continue today under the auspices of the CIA's Office of Research and Development. The children in the original experiments are now adults. Some have been able to go to college or technical schools, get jobs. get married, start families and become part of mainstream America. Some have never healed. The original men and women who devised the early experimental programmes are, at this point, usually retired or deceased. The laboratory assistants, often graduate and postdoctoral students, have gone on to other programmes, other research. Undoubtedly many of them never knew the breadth of the work of which they had been part. They also probably did not know of the controlled violence utilised in some tests and preparations. Many of the 'handlers' assigned to reinforce the separation of ego states have gone into other pursuits. But some have remained or have keen replaced. Some of the 'lab rats' whom they kept in in a climate of readiness, responding to the psychological triggers that would assure their continued involvement in whatever project the leaders desired, no longer have this constant reinforcement. Some of the minds have gradually stopped suppression of their past experiences. So it is with Cheryl, and now her sister Lynn.
— Cheryl Hersha, Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed To Kill For Their Country
sometimes the past is the best memories you lived ever cause it'll never repeat again
— Christine Minasian
Joy recollected is indeed no longer the emotion itself.
— Adam McOmber, This New & Poisonous Air
Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
More than anything, this place feels familiar. I bury my hands in the hot sand and think about the embodiment of memory or, more specifically, our natural ability to carry the past in our bodies and minds. Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation. I quietly thank this ancestor of mine for surviving the trip so that I could one day return.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
And Will knew what it was to see his dæmon. As she flew down to the sand, he felt his heart tighten and release in a way he never forgot. Sixty years and more would go by, and as an old man he would still feel some sensations as bright and fresh as ever: Lyra's fingers putting the fruit between his lips under the gold-and-silver trees; her warm mouth pressing against his; his dæmon being torn from his unsuspecting breast as they entered the world of the dead; and the sweet rightfulness of her coming back to him at the edge of the moonlight dunes.
— Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
An act of kindness may take only a moment of our time, but when captured in the heart the memory lives forever.
— Molly Friedenfeld, The Book of Simple Human Truths
Amnesia, which is a loss of memory, is a symptom of many different trauma and/or dissociative disorders, including PTSD, Dissociative Fugue, Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified and Dissociative Identity Disorder. Amnesia can affect both implicit and explicit memory.
— Ruth A. Lanius, The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease: The Hidden Epidemic
The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
The things that your eyes see plainly and cant forget are worse than huddled black figures left to the imagination.
— Kendare Blake, Anna Dressed in Blood
Regrets never sit well, with those that never forget.
— Anthony Liccione
So why bother investing in one’s memory in an age of externalized memories? The best answer I can give is the one I received unwittingly from EP, whose memory had been so completely lost that he could not place himself in time or space, or relative to other people. That is: How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memories. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character.
— Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
It is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate.
— William Faulkner, Light in August
Some things are not supposed to be forgotten
—  these are the things which make us human.
people say life is 
— Julio Alexi Genao, Collected
What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
There are two types of memory frequently experienced by individuals who have had overwhelming trauma that has been suppressed psychologically or chemically. The first is general memory, experienced as an adult, in which there is a natural recall of early events. The other is the memory that is often associated with post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS). The person suddenly smells, sees and feels as though he or she is actually living the event that took place months or years earlier.Many soldiers who survived horrifying combat experiences have PTSS. This has frequently been discussed in terms of Vietnam veterans who suddenly mentally find themselves in the jungle, hiding from the enemy or assaulting people they see as a threat. The fact that they have not been in Vietnam for decades and that they are experiencing the flashbacks in shopping malls, at home or at work does not change what they are mentally reliving. But PTSS has existed for centuries and has affected men, women and children in the midst of all wars, horrifying natural disasters and other traumatic experiences. This includes physical and sexual abuse when growing up.the PTSS Cheryl was experiencing more and more frequently, in which she found herself seeing, feeling and re-experiencing events from her childhood and adolescence had become overwhelming. She knew she needed to get help.
— Cheryl Hersha, Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed To Kill For Their Country
I have become an orchidwashed in on the salt white beach.Memory,what can I make of it nowthat might please you-this life, already wastedand still strewn with miracles?
— Mary Ruefle
The second day, I watched you suffer through one of your nightmares, but this one was worse than I’d seen before. You called out another man’s name.
— Julio Alexi Genao, When You Were Pixels
If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - than my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.
— Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic canister without breaking stride.
— William Gibson, Count Zero
I am truly crazy, I told myself. It's over. I am not fixable. I cannot tell Tom. I cannot even tell Francisco. So I won't tell anyone. My brain seemed out of control. Tom does not deserve a crazy wife and my children do not deserve a crazy mother. I finally get it. This is not just repressed memory. This is dissociative identity disorder.
— Suzie Burke, Wholeness: My Healing Journey from Ritual Abuse
A man who, night after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever dream of making, I do not say great discoveries, but even minute observations upon sleep? He barely knows that he does sleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory.
— Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
It seemed like it was always autumn in this field - it was fitting really. Everything was shaded with the bronzes and yellows of faded pictures from an old photo album, it was a realm where uncomfortable nostalgia reigned. I noticed it more after my experience in the dream. There I was an actor in the play, here I was a spectator.
— Mike   Jackson, Taven's Departing
I've got quite a memory. Engraved in my mind, things are. I can't forget anything...It's not a sign of intelligence...Nothing to boast about, memory...that's just how it is...
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Fable for Another Time
I'm back in the basement of the Ascension Catholic Church, Francisco. And Little Suzie is here. She's lying on an alter, and they're hurting her. The bastards. They're hurting her. There is blood all over the place. There are candles burning and people chanting." I could hardly believe what I was seeing and I cried out, "What is this? I don't understand. What the hell is this?""Ask your unconscious mind to tell you, Suzie," he responded, ever so gently. "Ask."I did ask. And the answer swept over me with a force so strong that I felt as if I had been knocked backward."Lord! Oh, Lord. This is satanic ritual abuse, Francisco. That's what this is! That's what this is!" I screamed. "Satanic ritual abuse. And they're using Little Suzie as part of their goddamned ritual.p150
— Suzie Burke, Wholeness: My Healing Journey from Ritual Abuse
One year later the society claimed victory in another case which again did not fit within the parameters of the syndrome, nor did the court find on the issue. Fiona Reay, a 33 year old care assistant, accused her father of systematic sexual abuse during her childhood. The facts of her childhood were not in dispute: she had run away from home on a number of occasions and there was evidence that she had never been enrolled in secondary school. Her father said it was because she was ‘young and stupid’. He had physically assaulted Fiona on a number of occasions, one of which occurred when she was sixteen. The police had been called to the house by her boyfriend; after he had dropped her home, he heard her screaming as her father beat her with a dog chain.As before there was no evidence of repression of memory in this case. Fiona Reay had been telling the same story to different health professionals for years. Her medical records document her consistent reference to family problems from the age of 14. She finally made a clear statement in 1982 when she asked a gynaecologist if her need for a hysterectomy could be related to the fact that she had been sexually abused by her father. Five years later she was admitted to psychiatric hospital stating that one of the precipitant factors causing her breakdown had been an unexpected visit from her father. She found him stroking her daughter. There had been no therapy, no regression and no hypnosis prior to the allegations being made public.The jury took 27 minutes to find Fiona Reay’s father not guilty of rape and indecent assault. As before, the court did not hear evidence from expert witnesses stating that Fiona was suffering from false memory syndrome. The only suggestion of this was by the defence counsel, Toby Hed­worth. In his closing remarks he referred to the ‘worrying phenomenon of people coming to believe in phantom memories’.The next case which was claimed as a triumph for false memory was heard in March 1995. A father was aquitted of raping his daughter. The claims of the BFMS followed the familiar pattern of not fitting within the parameters of false memory at all. The daughter made the allegations to staff members whom she had befriended during her stay in psychiatric hospital. As before there was no evidence of memory repression or recovery during therapy and again the case failed due to lack of corrobo­rating evidence. Yet the society picked up on the defence solicitor’s statements that the daughter was a prone to ‘fantasise’ about sexual matters and had been sexually promiscuous with other patients in the hospital.~ Trouble and Strife, Issues 37-43
— Trouble and Strife
Once fallen in true love, a person can't really fall out of it, no matter what. How much ever you try to hate your better half, you'll end up falling more instead. Some part of him will always reside in your heart.
— Mehek Bassi, Chained: Can you escape fate?
Love happens only once, what happens after that is just compromise; with your heart and with your life...
— Mehek Bassi, Chained: Can you escape fate?
You cannot make yourself have a flashback, nor will you have one unless you are emotionally ready to remember something. Once remembered, the memory can help you to face more of the truth. You can then express your pent-up feelings about the memory and continue on your path to recovery. Think of the flashback as a clue to the next piece of work. No matter how painful, try to view it as a positive indication that you are now ready and willing to remember.
— Beverly Engel, The Right to Innocence
Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Time, I think, is like walking backward away from something: say, from a kiss. First there is the kiss; then you step back, and the eyes fill up your vision, then the eyes are framed in the face as you step further away; the face then is part of a body, and then the body is framed in a doorway, then the doorway framed in the trees beside it. The path grows longer and the door smaller, the trees fill up your sight and the door is lost, then the path is lost in the woods and the woods lost in the hills. Yet somewhere in the center still is the kiss. That's what time is like.
— John Crowley, Engine Summer
There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
In the sea of my emotions, his presence is like a pearl in the oyster. Very hard to locate, yet very precious and still beautiful.
— Mehek Bassi, Chained: Can you escape fate?
In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure...
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
Whenever it rains, I remember him, not as a tear that hails down as a raindrop, but as a God of fertility. As, every time I remember him, his memories conceive a baby of emotions in me!
— Mehek Bassi, Chained: Can you escape fate?
Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterwards recalled to his mind's eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory.
— Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes
Humility is as good for the soul as it is for the memory
— Patricia C. Wrede, Thirteenth Child
Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?
— Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories
Comes a day when everything you thought you had put behind you sets up its tent in the middle of what you were still hoping you could call tomorrow and yells out, ‘Right this way.’Well, here I come.
— Laird Hunt, Kind One
What is living? Forging memories. What is dying? Forgetting them.I never die.
— Kaine Andrews
Write it down. Not just to remember it, but to forget it in the right way. My notebook are a kind of materialized subconscious, a hard-copy memory and its invisible substrata, following their own rules. More than once I have been surprised to discover that an idea I thought was new and original, something I set down in a notebook yesterday, is already contained in another note from years before. Sometimes the second version repeats the first, almost word for word, across the space of a decade. The earlier version, once brought with clarity to the surface, has been covered over again by layers of yellowing paper.
— Ivan Vladislavić
Classifying depression as an illness serves the psychiatric community and pharmaceutical corporations well; it also soothes the frightened, guilty, indifferent, busy, sadistic, and unschooled. To understand depression as a call for life-changes is not profitable. Stagnation is not a medical term. The 17.5 million Americans diagnosed as suffering a major depression in 1997 were mostly damned. (Psychobiological examinations confuse cause and symptom.) Deficient serotonergic functioning, ventral prefrontal cerebral cortex, dis-inhibition of impulsive-aggressive behavior, blah blah blah: the medical lexicon boils emotion from human being. Go take a drug, the doctor says. Pain is a biochemical phenomenon. Erase all memory.
— Antonella Gambotto-Burke, The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
...someone ought to invent a tool, a kind of plane to shave the lies away from stories and deception away from memories. I'm a collector of shavings.
— Saša Stanišić, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
Emotions retain a timeless photographic memory. Good or bad, you can never forget how a person makes you feel.
— Carl Henegan, Darkness Left Undone
We were still young enough to remember the cubist architecture of the piles of corpses we had seen during the war.
— George Konrád
I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.
— Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.
— André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
A name isn't a person,' Ga said. 'Don't ever remember someone by their name. To keep someone alive, you put them inside you, you put their face on your heart. Then, no matter where you are, they're always with you because they're a part of you.
— Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son
Circumstances cannot change how you feel. When you truly love someone – on a level that goes deeper than your mind, deeper than your memories, all the way to the very thing that makes you human – you do whatever it takes. You save him.
— Jessica Brody, Unremembered
Yes, the long memory is the most radical idea in this country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we're going, but where we want to go.
— Utah Phillips
Imperfect knowledge, incomplete assessment of feedback, limited memory and recall, as well as poor problem-solving skills result in a form of rationality that attains not optimal decisions but more or less satisfactory compromises between conflicting constraints.
— Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
Memory, when it juts, retreats, recovers, shows us how to hold the darkness, how to breathe.
— Drew Myron, Thin Skin
Even painful memories are ties that bind.
— Milan Kundera, Farewell Waltz
The darkness was memory.
— Jodi Meadows, Incarnate
Ever poised on that cusp between past and future, we tie memories to souvenirs like string to trees along life’s path, marking the trail in case we lose ourselves around a bend of tomorrow’s road.
— Susan Lendroth
What is strange is that we may remember what we have done, but not always why we did it.
— Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
I am remembering it now.
— Liz Rosenberg, The Laws of Gravity
To be left with only the trace of a memory is to gaze at an armchair that's still molded to the form of a love who has left never to return: It is to grieve, dear reader, it is to weep.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book
Time — how it expands to fill the spaces you create; how it makes meagre experiences seem never-ending. Whenever he heard people talk about the ravages of time, about how it robbed and deprived, Justin always smiled; because for him, time was an accomplice, plugging the gaps and fleshing out morsels of memory so he would have something substantial to hang on to. That way, however little he had seen or felt, he would always feel as if he had more: a life far richer than the truth.
— Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire
All of them are gone except for me
—  and for me nothing is gone.
I didn't want to remember...yet in remembering, it dawned on me - finally - just how far down God had reached to free me.
— Nikki Rosen, In The Eye Of Deception: A True Story
I know for a fact that no matter where I go, the memory and the suffering of not being with you will cripple me. I will go to work, fire up my PC, only to check if you're online. I will hover the pointer to your name, it will pop your contact details--just the contact details, no photo, no one-liners, no sign of what we used to have--but I shall linger and stare at it for hours. I will attempt to start a chat, but will close it without even a word to type. I will try to divert my thoughts back to work. But will fail. I will always go back to you. One hour to another, it's 5 PM. I pack my things, unproductive for the day and smile. I'm doing that again tomorrow and the next.
— CSTPimentel
A curiosity: my name, Rem, will someday come to mean a line of text in a language spoken only by machines. Specifically, it will mean a line that the machines can safely ignore--one that's only there as a mnemonic, a placeholder, for the people who give the machines their orders. A REM line might say something like "this bit is a self-contained sub loop" or "Steve Perlman in Marketing is a shit." The program as a whole rolls on past and around the REM lines, ignores them completely as it takes its shape, moves through its pre-ordained sequences, unfolds its wonders. My mother named me well.
— Louise Carey, The Steel Seraglio
Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.
— Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
So if existence was just binary, dead or alive, here or not here, what would be the fucking point in anything? My mom used to say that's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory--hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.
— Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks
—  it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.
What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someone’s memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones. Memories were the only things that made aging bearable, a way of reverting to better, simpler days.
— Andrea Lochen, The Repeat Year
Over the last few millennial, we've invented a series of technologies … that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to outsource this fundamental human capacity.
— Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
When we first hear [a] word, we start putting these associational hooks into it that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date.
— Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Dissociation is the common response of children to repetitive, overwhelming trauma and holds the untenable knowledge out of awareness. The losses and the emotions engendered by the assaults on soul and body cannot, however be held indefinitely. In the absence of effective restorative experiences, the reactions to trauma will find expression. As the child gets older, he will turn the rage in upon himself or act it out on others, else it all will turn into madness.
— Judith Spencer, Satans High Priest
Perfume is the key to our memories
— Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden
Have you ever been homesick for someplace that doesn'tactually exist anymore? Someplace that exists only in yourmind?
— Jenny  Lawson
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here. 
— Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills
He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He'd put it in almost fifty years before and hadn't had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn't find it.
— Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch
I now know how your angercame from skeletonsthat rattled in your heartand you couldn't escape them.
— Susie Clevenger, Dirt Road Dreams
Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Never be afraid when God brings back your past. Let your memory have its way with you. It is a minister of God bringing its rebuke and sorrow to you.
— Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest
You, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon—
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Since childhood, I was afflicted with a sick hypersensitivity, and my imagination quickly turned everything into a memory, too quickly: sometimes one day was enough, or an interval of a few hours, or a routine change of place, for an everyday event with a lyrical value that I did not sense at the time, to become suddenly adorned with a radiant echo, the echo ordinarily reserved only for those memories which have been standing for many years in the powerful fixative of lyrical oblivion.
— Danilo Kiš, Garden, Ashes
What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?
— Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes
Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things - landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people - that would otherwise have melted from my memory.
— David Gentleman, London You're Beautiful
For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.
— Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½  Chapters
It is also true that memory sometimes comes to him as a voice. It is a voice that speaks inside him, and it is not necessarily his own. It speaks to him in the way a voice might tell stories to a child, and yet at times this voice makes fun of him, or calls him to attention, or curses him in no uncertain terms. At times it willfully distorts the story it is telling him, changing the facts to suit its whims, catering to the interests of drama rather than truth. Then he must speak to it in his own voice and tell it to stop, thus returning it to the silence it came from. At other times it sings to him. At still other times it whispers. And then there are the times it merely hums, or babbles, or cries out in pain. And even when it says nothing, he knows it is still there, and in the silence of this voice that says nothing, he waits for it to speak.
— Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude
Sometimes we live too much in the past,remembering what we wished had happened.
— Harley King, Like A Hammer:Poems 1990 - 1999
Only a sentimental being would care about such everyday things—things used and discarded by the humans of their respective eras without thought, yet kept and preserved by an immortal who never forgot them. An immortal who loved and cared for them, dusting them off for an eternity, keeping their dead spirits as alive as he—stuck in their immortal tomb never to find the rest everything must eventually seek. Time had no meaning in this cavern of infinite age.
— Michelle M. Pillow, The Jaded Hunter
Don't we all have a certain number of images that stay around in our head, which we undoubtedly call memories and improperly so, and which we can never get rid of because they return in our sky with the regularity of a comet - torn away also from a world about which we know almost nothing? They return more frequently than comets do, in fact. It would be better, then, to speak of them as loyal satellites, a bit capricious and therefore even troublesome: they appear, disappear, suddenly come back to badger our memory at night when we cannot sleep. But, little as we may care to, as our hearts tell us to, we can also observe them at will, coldly, scrutinize their shadows, colors, and relief. Only, they are dead stars: from them we shall never grasp anything other than the certainty that we have already seen them, examined them, questioned them without really understanding the laws that the line of their mysterious orbits obeyed.
— Marc Augé, Oblivion
. . . things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them.
— Denis Johnson, The Name of the World
What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.
— Don DeLillo, Falling Man
Memory shimmers as a crystal lakethat reflects all things invisible.
— Harley King, Like A Hammer:Poems 1990 - 1999
A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life—the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives—as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them. I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
— Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
— Paul Auster
I don't want to be a memory, I want to be a thought
— Josue Rivera
Memories dancing through ageless ripples of time, waiting to be shared.
— Al Cash
Some people say it's easy to lie. This may be true for them, but the hard part is remembering the lie because a lie has no memory.
— Virginia Vayna
The question of what exactly we remember when we listen to old recordings, or whether it can be called remembering at all, becomes less and less answerable over a lifetime.
— Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears
It was amazing what I could remember about myself when I retraced my own steps.
— Cecil Castellucci, Rose Sees Red
Love is inaudible—until you hear it. And once you do, you’ll never forget the sound of her voice. 
— Dark Jar Tin Zoo, Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.
Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.
— Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.
— Marita Golden, Migrations of the Heart
I am stone and steel of your sleeping numbers
— I remember all you forget.I will die as many timesas you make me over again.
Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
— Joyce Carol Oates
We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful.
— Marc Augé, Oblivion
But you play that passage like it's the -memory- of love. You're so young, yet you know desertion, abandonment. That's why you play that third movement the way you do. Most cellists, they play it with joy. But for you, it's not about joy, it's about the memory of a joyful time that's gone for ever.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
So these things happen, deep in our lives. We do not speak of them. We hide them even from ourselves, but they do not leave us.
— David Malouf, An Imaginary Life
I suppose that having lost true love once, I never wanted to replace it with a lukewarm approximation that would only serve to make me remember it forever.
— Paola Kaufmann, The Sister: A Novel of Emily Dickinson
All great roads are paved with uncomfortable memories.
— Amy Neftzger, The Orphanage of Miracles
...dark embers smolder inside me - one touch and they flare - who would have thought memory combustible, or near you bright sparks appear?...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events
— Albert Einstein
My mom used to say that’s why we have memory. And the opposite of memory—hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.
— Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
Well we have to. We have to remember everything. If we don’t, by the time we grow up it’ll be gone forever.
— Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
It is getting dark. In the low mists over the hills, an orange glow broods, as if the trees are on fire. Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly.Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?
— Tan Twan Eng
Memory did not let go; it remained the net dragged in one's wake, with all sorts of strange things snarled in the knotted strands.
— Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds
Travel does this: it creates space that allows thoughts and memories to intrude and assert themselves with impunity. Smells and sights, the quality of light, the honk of a horn -- can all act as touchstones when least expected.
— Andrew McCarthy, The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down
This I have known, and these have come againWith echoing happiness in heart and brain;Time standing still, surrendering to meBeauty that otherwise would cease to be.
— William Kean Seymour, The Cats of Rome: New and Selected Poems
The kiss stayed there with no place to go, no sensory reserve that could absorb it and file it away as a common act of intimacy, a thousand times received. He knew what Anna was asking: whether you could love someone without habits.
— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room
Aristotle was convinced that a trained memory helped the development of logical thought processes.
— Janet M. Tavakoli, Archangels: Rise of the Jesuits
Ricci created memory palaces in his mind. Each item in the palace represented a series of concepts. The rooms and locations within the palace served as directories and files, similar to computer data storage. Ricci instantaneously learned, retained and retrieved hundreds of new Chinese kanji, to the astonished delight of Chinese nobles.
— Janet M. Tavakoli, Archangels: Rise of the Jesuits
The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.
— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room
Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.
— Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir
In our beautiful memoryWe were all handsomeWe could all singWe all had the heart Of the prettiest girl in townAnd we all hit .300
— John Buck O'Neil
Imagine a society entirely absorbed in its own historicity. It would be incapable of producing historians. Living entirely under the sign of the future, it would satisfy itself with automatic self-recording processes and auto-inventory machines, postponing indefinitely the task of understanding itself
— Pierre Nora, Les Lieux De Mémoire
There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told and what is true.
— Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The colors of living things begin to fade with the last breath, and the soft, springy skin and supple muscle rot within weeks. But the bones sometimes remain, faithful echoes of the shape, to bear some last faint witness to the glory of what was.
— Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us of time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.
— Ray Bradbury, A Pleasure to Burn: Fahrenheit 451 Stories
I breathed in the memory of his lips, the softness of them, and how they felt tracing across my skin, leaving ripples of goosebumps in their wake.
— Sarah Alderson
This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have been difficult for me to understand. It was a very long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama, “Go with the boy.” The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
...your memory is a warm stone hidden in my hand I'm always turning over...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
He wore the memory of her embrace like armor, and though he knew it would not save his life, it would be all that was left to him to ease his passage into whatever lay beyond.
— Andrew Levkoff, A Mixture of Madness
...I want to live doubly - first with you and then afterwards in memory ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
My memory is good for some things and not others.
— Ann Brashares, My Name Is Memory
How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at age thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.Honda felt that his youth had ended with the death of Kiyoaki Matsugae. At that moment something real within him, something that had burned with a vibrant brilliance, suddenly ceased to be.Now, late at night, when Honda grew weary of his legal drafts, he would pick up the dream journal that Kiyoaki had left him and turn over its pages.(...)Since then eighteen years had passed. The border between dream and memory had grown indistinct in Honda’s mind. Because the words contained in this journal, his only souvenir of his friend, had been traced there by Kiyoaki’s own hand, it had profound significance for Honda. These dreams, left like a handful of gold dust in a winnowing pan, were charged with wonder.As time went by, the dreams and the reality took on equal worth among Honda’s diverse memories. What had actually occurred was in the process of merging with what could have occurred. As reality rapidly gave way to dreams, the past seemed very much like the future.When he was young, there had been only one reality, and the future had seemed to stretch before him, swelling with immense possibilities. But as he grew older, reality seemed to take many forms, and it was the past that seemed refracted into innumerable possibilities. Since each of these was linked with its own reality, the line distinguishing dream and reality became all the more obscure. His memories were in constant flux, and had taken on the aspect of a dream.
— Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses
Nature has certain mechanism to record all memories of every life being.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
...I've decided ... love is an eternity of slow motion replays ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Financial crashes happen precisely because the people who remember the last one have either died or retired and thus are no longer around, with memories and character formed by that previous experience, to warn people not to be irresponsible.
— N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters
The true art of memory, is the art of attention
— Samuel Johnson
Good memories invite heaven.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut