c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
When men do not forget what can be forgotten but forget what cannot be forgotten - that may be called true forgetting.
— Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
We are the things we don't remember,the blank spaces, the forgotten words.
— Cecilia Ruiz
Some people would never forget certain people, a few people would remember everyone, and most of us would mostly be forgotten.
— Joshua Ferris
To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.
— Walter Benjamin
She used to wander through the past as often as it beckoned her, bemoaning the loss of nostalgia. Then, for a while, she turned from it, blissfully free of its noxious clutch, and now it's back, taunting her with what she left behind, knowing she can never recapture what's gone.
— Donna Lynn Hope
I'm not perfect, I'm beautifully imperfect
— Shujoy Chowdhury
And the pine trees that smell so wonderfully of spicy power. Shall I never see a mountain pine again? Really that would be no misfortune. To forgo something: that also has its fragrance and its power.
— Robert Walser
Images are the pegs holding down memory's billowing tent.
— Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir
But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we came.That is why history should be taught in school. to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.
— Penelope Lively
Today and every day, live and lead the memory you want to leave behind.
— Jon Mertz, Activate Leadership: Aspen Truths to Empower Millennial Leaders
...education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can't have higher-level learning- you can't analyze-without retrieving information.' And you can't retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between "learning" and "memorizing" is false, Matthews contends. You can't learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can't memorize without learning.
— Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
I don't want to be memorized for everyone. I want to stay real,endless and inchangeable for my parents, kids and their descendants.
— Alexander Zalan, Petals of Decades
...first, in order to remember, something must be forgotten; second, the place where memories are stored has no boundaries. In other words, forgetting is a twin; its tandem effect is best called "simultancous" distraction, the instant when one memory defoliates another. This fuzzy double - one devouring the other - presumably inhibits learning
— Norman Klein
If you don't write it down, it never happened.Cathy (& Jack) Ryan
— Tom Clancy
You may forget the one with whom you have laughed, but never the one with whom you have wept.
— Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
He doesn't know who I am.
— Marie Lu, Champion
I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
I was sad to leave, but I was also pleased to have met people outside of Sierra Leone. Because if I was to get killed upon my return, I knew that a memory of my existence was alive somewhere in the world.
— Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Just remember: If you make unfounded assumptions before choosing a path, you’re blindly sauntering along.
— Auliq Ice
The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.
— Milan Kundera
It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around...
— Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation
When I returned to camp, they walked behind me on the trail, and we spoke not a word about getting skunked today, but rather talked about the days we returned with a stringer full of fish, and how we filleted them and the left the guts out for bears and eagles, and how those fish tasted fresh when we fried them over a fire.
— Daniel J. Rice, The Unpeopled Season: Journal from a North Country Wilderness
Women do not lie about their age. In fact, no woman ever has, its just that memory is the first thing to go.
— David C. Holley, Write like no one is reading
You may ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnesses for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.
— Ford Madox Ford
The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end grows near, each moment becomes more and more valuable and there is no time to waste on recollection. It's important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia, that it is most powerful in early youth , when the volume of life that has passed is quite small.
— Milan Kundera
Facts you can bend. Memories are much stronger things.
— Isvari, The Eyes of Mikra
Nobody told me about him [my grandfather], and he died when I was six, and yet within the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been born and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well. It is rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially for the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though children may not understand what is said and done before them, and have no interest in it at the time, and though they may forget it at once and for years, yet these things that they have seen and heard and not noticed have after all impressed themselves for ever on their minds, and when they are men and women come crowing back with surprising and often painful distinctness, and away frisk all the cherished little illusions in flocks.
— Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden
But I remember the place with fondness ... not perfect but, all in all, not a bad memory.
— Diane Meier, The Season of Second Chances
Perhaps memory is like a bucket; if you want to cram into it more fruit than it will hold, the fruit is crushed.
— Primo Levi, If Not Now, When?
The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it's the study of historians' studies. . . .Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.
— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
There are photographs of people you don't recognize and photographs of you in ways you don't wish to be remembered, but they each contain elements of places or times you do not wish to forget.
— Diane Meier, The Season of Second Chances
Regard for the past only extends to its outward forms.
— Henrik Bering
Other than that, we have each told the truth, and each truth is our own.
— Liz Welch, The Kids Are All Right: A Memoir
Rhythm becoming thought, thought becoming memory; memory, which tends to shuck itself, to peel away. You get older, look back through a child's tunnel vision, and realize you never knew the whole that tied the details together. You were just along for the ride, moving from experience to experience, a flat spectacle, some kind of guideless tour. You remember--or think you remember--what happened, but not where, or why. What you did, but not with who. Details fade. People's names get lost in the white noise.
— Gemma Files, We Will All Go Down Together
The conscious mind is intended as a focusing tool, not a storing place.
— Matthew Perman
A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur.
— V.S. Naipaul
There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles
— Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts
The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember.
— Jacob A. Riis
So - people a thousand years from now...This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.
— Thornton Wilder
But I can't see anything any more: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask tobe imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.
— Paul Fussell
As usual, he saves his wife's for last. He leans on the cane and he looks at the headstone and he thinks about many things. Taffy. He thinks about taffy. He thinks it would take his teeth out now, but he would eat it anyhow, if it meant eating it with her.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence?
— Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Perhaps love is like a resting place, a shelter from the storm. It exists to give you comfort, it is there to keep you warm, and in those times of trouble when you are most alone, the memory of love will bring you home.
— John Denver, Take Me Home: An Autobiography
We look at the world once, in childhood.The rest is memory
— Louise Glück
Happiness is in love, in service, and in beautiful memory.
— Debasish Mridha
Life is a journey, education is our pleasure and our memory.
— Debasish Mridha
The magic of love is that it becomes our memory which we never can forget.
— Debasish Mridha
It is impossible for me to remember how many days or weeks went by in this way. Time is round, and it rolls quickly.
— Nikos Kazantzakis, Saint Francis
There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ's sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It's all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It's all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries.
— Harry Leslie Smith, Harry's Last Stand: How the World My Generation Built is Falling Down, and What We Can Do to Save It
You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating themlike sutras Xuan Zhang fetched from India, testing waysreturn might be possible against these homesick inventions, trace the traveller's alien steps across borders, and in between discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns grew out of not knowing whether to return or to stay, and then became home.
— Boey Kim Cheng, Clear Brightness
But memory is less disposed to compromise
— Albert Camus, The Plague
There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.
— Richard  Holmes
People are more likely to remember the great social interaction they had with a colleague than the great meeting they both attended.
— Ron Garan, The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles
I can’t give up my faith in the longpaws. I understand that we can’t rely on the longpaws to help us anymore. But one of us has to remember. One of us has to carry the memories for the rest of the Pack. I’ll do it.
— Erin Hunter, The Empty City
Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer. They control the most simple Proustian episode, and an understanding of their mechanism must precede any particular analysis of their application.
— Samuel Beckett, Proust
We can choose not to remember this day, but bones have strong memories. And earth never forgets.
— Magaly Guerrero, AlmaMia Cienfuegos and Other Stories
The magnitude of any one day is compromised by its passing quickly into the next, a mere moment in time which soon fades into the collective memory of our past.
— Timothy W. Tron
There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.
— David Nicholls, One Day
But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like those about journeys to countries where nobody has ever been.
— Marcel Proust, Time Regained
Hold each moment you create on your sacred journey close to your heart, for that is the location where your memory will be deposited.
— Molly Friedenfeld
I felt the kiss still there on my forehead. Literally. It was frozen there. I could still feel it. I wanted to bronze it, like people do with baby shoes. I wanted to mount it and hang it over my mantelpiece.
— Catherine Ryan Hyde, Jumpstart the World
The Place would already have started the leisurely, enjoyable process of digesting her into just one more piece of local gore-lore, half ghost story and half morality play, half urban myth and half just the way life goes. It would eat her memory whole, the same way its ground had eaten her body.
— Tana French, Faithful Place
One hundred twenty-nine women with previously documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked detailed questions about their abuse histories to answer the question "Do people actually forget traumatic events such as child sexual abuse, and if so, how common is such forgetting?" A large proportion of the women (38%) did not recall the abuse that had been reported 17 years earlier. Women who were younger at the time of the abuse and those who were molested by someone they knew were more likely to have no recall of the abuse. The implications for research and practice are discussed. Long periods with no memory of abuse should not be regarded as evidence that the abuse did not occur. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol 62(6), Dec 1994, 1167-1176
— Linda M. Williams
We all have strategies to distract ourselves from what we cannot bear. Memory, for example, serves such a function.
— Paul Park
Music replays the past memories, awaken our forgotten worlds and make our minds travel.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
looking at my reflection, in the window opposite, hollow and translucent, I see a woman disappearing. It would help if I looked like that in real life – if the more the disease advanced, the more ‘see-through’ I became until, eventually, I would be just a wisp of a ghost. How much more convenient it would be, how much easier for everyone, including me, if my body just melted away along with my mind. Then we’d all know where we were, literally and metaphysically.
— Rowan Coleman, The Day We Met
When your heart knows the truth, it never forgets.
— Shannon L. Alder
He was on her mind but she doesn't let anyone stay for too long.
— Donna Lynn Hope
...I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
He was really quite addicted to her face, and yet for the longest time he could not remember it at all, it being so much brighter than sunlight on a pool of water that he could only recall that blinding brightness; then after awhile, since she refused to give him her photograph, he began to practice looking away for a moment when he was still with her, striving to uphold in his inner vision what he had just seen (her pale, serious, smooth and slender face, oh, her dark hair, her dark hair), so that after immense effort he began to retain something of her likeness although the likeness was necessarily softened by his fallibility into a grainy, washed-out photograph of some bygone court beauty, the hair a solid mass of black except for parallel streaks of sunlight as distinct as the tines of a comb, the hand-tinted costume sweetly faded, the eyes looking sadly, gently through him, the entire image cob-webbed by a sheet of semitranslucent Thai paper whose white fibers twisted in the lacquered space between her and him like gorgeous worms; in other words, she remained eternally elsewhere.
— William T. Vollmann, Europe Central
I didn't sleep well last night because one of my ghosts came back, haunting with his presence, and when I woke up, the others weren't here, haunting with their memory.
— Donna Lynn Hope
I remember, in no particular order:—a shiny inner wrist;—steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;—gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;—a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;—another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;—bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us 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.I’m not very interested in my schooldays, and don’t feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
...so you have found me and would know the tale. When a poet speaks of truth to another poet, waht hope has truth? Let me ask this, then. DOes one find memory in invention? Or will you find invention in memory? Wich bows in servitude befor the other? Will the measure of greatness be weighed solely in details? Perhaps so, if details make up the full weft of the world, if themes are nothing more than the coomposite of lists perfectly ordered and unerring rendered; and if I should kneel before invention, as if it were memory made perfect.
— Steven Erikson
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.
— Ray Bradbury
the essential feature of the Dissociative Disorders is a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity,or perception
— American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR
I've worked hard to remember it...The problem is I'm not sure what's real memory and what's my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light. Except I'm sure of my bright light.
— Phil Klay
Ferrari: How odd, Borges, it seems that we are talking constantly through memory. Sometimes, our conversations remind me of a dialogue between two memories.Borges: In fact, that’s what it is. If we are something, we are our past, aren’t we? Our past is not what can be recorded in a biography or in the newspapers. Our past is our memory. That memory can be hidden or inaccurate—it doesn’t matter. It’s there, isn’t it? It can be a lie but that lie becomes part of our memory, part of us. (Conversations, Vol. 1)
— Jorge Luis Borges
Don't let the day go by without a handful of fun, for only those we'll be memorable and even intensified through time
— A.M.M Alusi
I was right when I said a very long time ago that our age would leave few living documents behind it: it was rare for anyone to keep a diary, letters were short and businesslike--"I'm alive and well"--and few memoirs were written. There are many reasons for this. Let me mention just one, not perhaps recognized by everybody: we were too often at loggerheads with our own past to give it proper thought. Within the half-century, our ideas on people and events have changed many times; conversations were broken off in mid-sentence; thoughts and feelings could not but be affected by circumstances.
— Ilya Ehrenburg
Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a crime."Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.Tengo went on, “Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.
— Haruki Murakami
Some people say the rain with no purpose and others say with memories and wishes
— Tagor Manroo
Not the slow Hearse, where nod the sable plumes,     The Parian Statue, bending o'er the Urn,     The dark robe floating, the dejection worn     On the dropt eye, and lip no smile illumes; Not all this pomp of sorrow, that presumes     It pays Affection's debt, is due concern     To the FOR EVER ABSENT, tho' it mournFashion's allotted time. If Time consumes, While Life is ours, the precious vestal-flame     Memory shou'd hourly feed;—if, thro' each day,     She with whate'er we see, hear, think, or say, Blend not the image of the vanish'd Frame,     O! can the alien Heart expect to prove, In worlds of light and life, a reunited love!
— Anna Seward, Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace
The memory of the dead is indeed a good remorse. (Le souvenir des morts - Est bien un bon remords)
— Charles de Leusse, Le Sablier
There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late.
— Thomas Pynchon
She kept forcing herself to remember the entire conversation, playing it back and playing it back, all the way through, forcing a finger down her memory's throat.
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
In my restless dreams,I see that town.Silent Hill.
— Sadamu Yamashita
A memory is lodged in the mind but a feeling inhabits the whole body
— Denis Avey, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II
The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
How unfortunate is the guy who does not live in the extravagant memory of an infatuated young woman.
— Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People
I guess we all have some of these - memories like artillery shells, fired at close range.
— Lauren Oliver, Rooms
Silently we went round and round,And through each hollow mindThe memory of dreadful thingsRushed like a dreadful wind,And horror stalked before each man,And terror crept behind.
— Oscar Wilde, The Ballad Of Reading Gaol
But then comes a time when forgetting isn't possible. And I do mean a particular time when no amount of dreaming, not then and maybe not ever, can change how naked and unimportant we become in our own eyes.
— Stig Dagerman
Sometimes I long to forget… It is painful to be conscious of two worlds.
— Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language
You grieve at first. And then slowly, with the yawning of the years, the disappeared gets scraped from your memory, the way your flesh can be peeled from your limbs. It's very harsh and extremely painful. But it gets done, square inch-by-square inch. Until, the skin that is your memory gets completely scarred and numbed. You live. The disappeared is detached from the dermis of remembering. And that is what is known as moving on.
— Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
No one really remembers anything five minutes after it happens.
— Marty Rubin
The air is cold and dusk has descended. In the distance lightning flickers and a far away rumble of thunder awakens my thoughts and makes me remember.
— Donna Lynn Hope
I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.
— Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
Awake your soul to happy memories.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
My memories always clutch my brain to understand the past
— Munia Khan
The 'Instagram Generation' now experiences the present as an anticipated memory.
— Daniel Kahneman
I have forgotten more of my life than I remember, and with my forgetting I have lost my being.
— Russell Hoban, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz
I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
— Michel Foucault
Remember you?” I croaked. “I came back for you
— Katy Evans, Rogue
Nature never remembers, that’s why she’s beautiful.
— Alberto Caeiro
We lose track of everything, and of everyone, even ourselves. The facts of my father's life are less known to me than those of the life of Hadrian. My own existence, if I had to write of it, would be reconstructed by me from externals, laboriously, as if it were the life of someone else: I should have to turn to letters, and to the recollections of others, in order to clarify such uncertain memories. What is ever left but crumbled walls, or masses of shade?
— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
[M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.
— Elizabeth F. Loftus
The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don't want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
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 exist.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.
— Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
But sometimes the memories feel so real, so visceral, so personal, that I confuse them with my own.
— Gayle Forman, If I Stay
I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the house where I grew up even though I have not been inside it for decades . . . I want to be able to walk through the house of my own life until my life is done. I want to hold on to who and what I have been even as both become somehow inevitably less.
— Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake
Though you forget the way to the Temple,There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not. You shall not deny the Stranger.
— T.S. Eliot, The Rock
As dye soaks fibres, drawn into them to change their colour forever, so does a memory, stinging or sweet, change the fibre of a man’s character.
— Robin Hobb, Fool's Assassin
Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits.
— Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets
Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.p. 428
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
...no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.
— Catherine Lacey
If you want to draw some advantage from your history, you must accept not only this miracle but also many others. In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out of loneliness receive caring teachers who are really the children themselves moved back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding lights to it to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut.
— Alejandro Jodorowsky, Where the Bird Sings Best
Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing 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, The Garden of Evening Mists
More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
— Kazuo Ishiguro
If there's one thing I've still got, it's my memory. Which is too bad. Maybe if I forgot things once in a while, we'd all be a little bit happier.
— Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why
Tigana, let my memory ofyou be like a blade in mysoul.
— Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana
Three scents accompany my memories of this place: cut wood, poppy-seed bread, and the soft, crisp smell of snow.
— Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love
We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us ... we are doing the work of memory.
— Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings
— Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four
Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.
— Audrey Niffenegger, The Night Bookmobile
...infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyse mechanisms of which otherwise we should know nothing. A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to the study of the phenomena of memory.
— Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
Tarrou had "lost the match," as he put it. But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing affection and being destined one day to remember it. So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarrou, perhaps, would have called that winning the match.
— Albert Camus, The Plague
When a memory fails to appear, it seems as though the time when it was created did not really exist, and maybe that is true. Time itself is nothing; only the experience of it is something. When that dies, it assumes the form of a denial, the symbol of mortality, what you have already lost before you lose everything. When his friend had said something similar to his father, his response had been, "If you had to retain everything, you’d explode. There’s simply not enough space for it all. Forgetting is like medicine; you have to take it at the right time.
— Cees Nooteboom, Roads to Berlin
Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order o make sense of the world around us?
— Twang Eng Tan
In a sense, the recording stylus and its reverse component have defeated time. Up until a little more than a generation ago, the sound of a word once uttered, a violin note once played, were possible treasures dropped into the none too safe repository of human memory; but the same sounds transferred to a wax or plastic or film or wire can live and vibrate again fifteen minutes or fifty years from now.
— Judith C. Waller, Radio: The Fifth Estate
You cannot build a complete memory with a single memory tool any more than you can build a complete building with a single carpentry tool.
— Kenneth L. Higbee, Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It
There is a hopeless longing for nostalgia that pervades the human soul, a return to the warm glow of remembrance or some imagined past.
— Deborah L. Norris, The House Guest: Pathway to Persuasion
For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.
— Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
As Mary Grannon, the beloved Mary of The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Just Mary’ hour says:So many parents are clinging to some favorite story in their own youth and measuring all children's material by it—forgetting what the last minstrel found out in his travels, that 'old times are changed, old manners gone, a stranger fills the Stuart's throne.' Let's not be like the bigots of the iron time; let's be rooters for the modern.
— Judith C. Waller, Radio: The Fifth Estate
What have I kept of Rae Evans from the moment when she half stood behind her desk and held out her hand to shake mine? I think it is the impression of white--white face, white shirt between two halves of a power dark suit. Hers were night colors, and though it was early in the morning, and she was my new boss, it seemed as though the business day had not quite caught up to us, and maybe never would.
— Dorothy Johnston, The Trojan Dog
Time flies by so fast, I wish I can go back
— Donna Liu
...fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone, we're left with the concept, but not the true memory--why else...would anyone give birth more than once?
— Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife
Rosemary was unaccustomed to worrying about what people thought of her memories. She certainly did not judge others on theirs. In a society that circulated memories as currency, such judgment was considered the height of prudishness. 
— Octavia Cade, Trading Rosemary
From one moment to another memory steps back to rediscover the past
— Munia Khan
History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
— Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Put out my eyes, and I can see you still;slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;and without any feet can go to you;and tongueless, I can conjure you at will.Break off my arms, I shall take hold of youand grasp you with my heart as with a hand;arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;and if you set this brain of mine afire,upon my blood I then will carry you.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours
To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.
— Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere then evaporated, leaving only memory.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
These were the moments that would stick in her memory for years to come, those instants of perfect bliss that nothing else would ever match again.
— Francesca Marciano, The Other Language
Memories are not always the best measure of things.
— Amy Neftzger, The Orchard of Hope
Memory is the 'filling cabinet' of the brain wherein is stored all thought impulses, all conscious experiences, and all sensations which reach the brain through the five physical senses.
— Napoleon Hill, You Can Work Your Own Miracles
I wished, more than anything, to forget. But what I had, more than anything, was time to remember.
— Ann Somerville, Remastering Jerna
Our experi¬ences and our memories are within us, and the key is to be aware of the lens or the filter, to realise that we can also change the angle, especially when we are feeling agitated or stuck in life, that we can change the record.
— Gyalwa Dokhampa, The Restful Mind
He knew perfectly well (even if he wasn’t inclined to admit it) that the material body had a spiritual aspect. He knew that “spirit,” however explained, was real, because of his own undeniable experiences—which, though he might suppress them, he couldn’t altogether erase from memory.
— Sol Luckman, Snooze: A Story of Awakening
Are we not, all of us, in some way, damaged mirrors? Are we not constantly engaged in focusing the light of thought—memories out of the depths of human experience—onto the photographic plate of each moment? The image captured in this instant is a snapshot of all eternity, subtly altered by our own brokenness. And who’s to say that the image formed by a damaged mirror is not a truer picture of the universe?
— Yael Shahar
Only with steadfast memories can we now be strong so as to undo the mistakes of the past, to begin anew and build from the rubble of their betrayal...
— F. Sionil José, Gagamba: The Spider Man
I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing—as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it’s the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence.
— Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke
Memories are powerful that way. They can bring a person back to another place and time and make them laugh or cry all over again.
— Shannon Wiersbitzky, What Flowers Remember
Our experiences and our memories are within us, and the key is to be aware of the lens or the filter, to realise that we can also change the angle, especially when we are feeling agitated or stuck in life, that we can change the record.
— Gyalwa Dokhampa, The Restful Mind
It's all right, Ginny. It's over. It's just a memory.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising.
— Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters
The only way to truly record a person is not in words, not in still frames, but in bone and skin and memory.
— Victoria Schwab, The Archived
The gates of memory would roll open—old joys would stretch out their arms to them, old hopes and dreams would call to them, and they would stir beneath the burden that lay upon them, and feel its forever immeasurable weight. They could not even cry out beneath it; but anguish would seize them, more dreadful than the agony of death.
— Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
People with dissociative disorders are like actors trapped in a variety of roles. They have difficulty integrating their memories, their sense of identity and aspects of their consciousness into a continuous whole. They find many parts of their experience alien, as if belonging to someone else. They cannot remember or make sense of parts of their past.
— David Speigel
One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.
— Gaston Bachelard
A lover of comfort might shrug after looking at the whole apparent jumble of furniture, old paintings, statues with missing arms and legs, engravings that were sometimes bad but precious in memory, and bric-a-brac. Only the eye of a connoisseur would have blazed with eagerness at the sight of this painting or that, some book yellowed with age, a piece of old porcelain, or stones and coins.But the furniture and paintings of different ages, the bric-a-brac that meant nothing to anyone but had been marked for them both by a happy hour or memorable moment, and the ocean of books and sheet music breathed a warm life that oddly stimulated the mind and aesthetic sense. Present everywhere was vigilant thought. The beauty of human effort shone here, just as the eternal beauty of nature shone all around.pp. 492-493
— Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Here's what I think: when you're born, you're assigned a brain like you're assigned a desk, a nice desk, with plenty of pigeonholes and drawers and secret compartments. At the start, it's empty, and then you spend your life filling it up. You're the only one who understands the filing system, you amass some clutter, sure, but somehow it works: you're asked the capital of Oregon, and you say Salem; you want to remember your first-grade teacher's name, and there it is, Miss Fox. Then suddenly you're old, and though everything's still in your brain, it's crammed so tight that when you try to remember the name of the guy who does the upkeep on your lawn, your first childhood crush comes fluttering out, or the persistent smell of tomato soup in a certain Des Moines neighborhood.
— Elizabeth McCracken, Niagara Falls All Over Again
He was stabbed by memory, that tyrant which impinges upon our dreams and leaps at out throat as soon as we awaken.
— Françoise Sagan, Dans un mois, dans un an
I wanted a life of adventure. I wanted to travel. I wanted to work my way up to being Somebody. I wanted to leave a mark on the Earth and be remembered.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Danse Macabre (Night's Dream, #2)
Forgiveness is an attribute we must practice , as we all want the Al-mighty to forgive us. But forgetting and trusting again with a revivifying attitude is undoubtedly stark exhausting . We have a wonderful memory like a nostalgic alarm which hurdles us in bandaging the heart and mind just like a new one.
— AISHA RAHEEL
This is a story, told the way you say stories should be told: Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country. This, of course, is the barest outline, and futile to discuss. It’s as pointless as throwing birdseed on the ground while snow still falls fast. Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up: the black shroud over the pool. Love, in its shortest form, becomes a word. What I remember about all that time is one winter. The snow. Even now, saying “snow,” my lips move so that they kiss air. No mention has been made of the snowplow that seemed always to be there, scraping snow off our narrow road — an artery cleared, though neither of us could have said where the heart was.
— Ann Beattie, Snow
One day all the memories die , Be patient ...
— Arash Pakravesh, Love Story
I would have no need for the Memory Of Things past if those which were Present were more agreeable
— Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
Inconstancy of every second punishes me.The wind, the rain, the clouds, the days,I try to grasp the hours but they banish me,And I remain in the vortex of incongruity.The lone coyote shrieks,Startling my soul into wakefulness.The Cacti bloom and the Wren beckons,Deepening my mind into dreamlessness.And the moments spend time with inconstancy,increasing the ease of uneasiness.Why this daily pilgrimage of ideas?When no saint has ever ceased the day!Still yearning for some magic hour,Where nothing but permanence dwells.Alas, only this thought be the only truth,That certainty in death is constant.And so, in every second, minute, hour,our only gain is memory.Be it bitter or sweet:it is ours!Rejoice.
— Ansul Noor, Soul Fire
The memory is a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets.
— Taylor Mali
Why could this darkness rip the gloominess around meHad an unknown reason of being fearful for so longThinking, if its touched by these horrendous windsWill unleash my sorrowful side & my mood swings!Aesthetically pleasing it is now, Couldn't yearn for it to be any betterThis oasis of serenity though, I trust will cast away all my darkness & dust!
— Shumila Shah
Tomorrow is a memory best forgotten.
— Harley King
Memory in the mind of man can adapt to the worst conditions. I'll give you an example, an analogy of sorts: Each night I sop rags with beer and lay them out in careful strips. With rags soaked in beer I tease cockroaches from a crack in the baseboard. By morning they're good and drunk and I pop them into a baggy, then take them outside and throw the little buggers away.
— Bob Thurber, Nothing But Trouble
Like her father, Bess never forgot a hurt or a service.
— Jeane Westin, His Last Letter: Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester
Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.
— Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
— Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name
Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.
— Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
She smiles, and her eyes look as if they can see back into her memory, into all the things that have gone into making a person what they are.
— Lois Lowry, A Summer to Die
It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning -- it'll be 
— Mary Oliver
She was also a memory, the worst kind of memory--the kind that pulled you to your knees at just the sound of her name.
— Laura     Miller, My Butterfly
I think of the memory as being rather like a dam," he said, after a pause for thought. "It irrigates and gives life to our whole spirit. But, like a dam, it needs overflow channels if it's not to burst its banks. Because if it ever does overflow or burst, its waters will destroy everything in its path.
— Bernardo Atxaga, Obabakoak
These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.
— Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being