c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like ancient stars that have burned out, are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. New styles, new information, new technology, new terminology … But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
You realize that you habitually thought of Mom when something in your life was not going well, because when you thought of her it was as though something got back on track, and you felt re-energized.
— Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom
When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
The smells of Christmas are the smells of childhood
— Richard Paul Evans, The Christmas Box
Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me.
— Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
— Willa Cather, My Ántonia
...we should be remembered for the things we do. The things we do are the most important things of all. They are more important than what we say or what we look like. The things we do outlast our mortality. The things we do are like monuments that people build to honour heroes after they've died. They're like the pyramids that the Egyptians built to honour the Pharaohs. Only instead of being made out of stone, they're made out of the memories people have of you. That's why your deeds are like your monuments. Built with memories instead of with stone.
— R.J. Palacio
What you remember saves you.
— W.S. Merwin
Now that I have opened that bottle of memories they're pouring out like wine, crimson and bittersweet.
— Ellen Hopkins, Impulse
There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.
— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
The only real treasure is in your head. Memories are better than diamonds and nobody can steal them from you
— Rodman Philbrick, The Last Book in the Universe
There were some memories, though, that never faded.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Bones
And the moral of the story is that you don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.
— John Green
It was only high school after all, definitely one of the most bizarre periods in a person’s life. How anyone can come through that time well adjusted on any level is an absolute miracle.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
I guess sometimes the greatest memories are made in the most unlikely of places, further proof that spontaneity is more rewarding than a meticulously planned life.
— J.A. Redmerski, The Edge of Always
The important thing about having lots of things to remember is that you’ve got to go somewhere afterwards where you can remember them, you see? You’ve got to stop. You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.
— Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic
Of all that I have possessed in my life, my memories are the only things remaining to me. Indeed, I believe that memories are the only real treasure any human can hope to hold always.
— Gary Jennings, Aztec
Too many years fighting back tears. Why can't the past just die? Wishing you were somehow here again, knowing we must say goodbye. Try to forgive, teach me to live, give me the strength to try! No more memories, no more silent tears, no more gazing across the wasted years. Help me say goodbye.
— Charles  Hart, The Phantom of the Opera: Piano/Vocal
There are memories I am better off without. Things better lost forever.
— S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep
Her body was a prison, her mind was a prison. Her memories were a prison. The people she loved. She couldn't get away from the hurt of them. She could leave Eric, walk out of her apartment, walk forever if she liked, but she couldn't escape what really hurt. Tonight even the sky felt like a prison.
— Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting
When something horrible happens, your brain doesn't process the memories right. It stores everything-- sounds, pain, smells, feelings-- all mixed up. It doesn't matter if you believed it or it made sense; it gets stored.
— Cherise Sinclair, To Command and Collar
From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .
— David Nicholls, Us
In AP Bio, I learned that the cells in our body are replaced every seven years, which means that one day, I'll have a body full of cells that were never sick. But it also means that parts of me that knew and loved Sadie will disappear. I'll still remember loving her, but it'll be a different me who loved her. And maybe this is how we move on. We grow new cells to replace the grieving ones, diluting our pain until it loses potency.The percentage of my skin that touched hers will lessen until one day my lips won't be the same lips that kissed hers, and all I'll have are the memories. Memories of cottages in the woods, arranged in a half-moon. Of the tall metal tray return in the dining hall. Of the study tables in the library. The rock where we kissed. The sunken boat in Latham's lake, Sadie, snapping a photograph, laughing the lunch line, lying next to me at the movie night in her green dress, her voice on the phone, her apple-flavored lips on mine. And it's so unfair. All of it.
— Robyn Schneider, Extraordinary Means
In this world of memories, there's no need for strangers.-Kenshin to Kaoru
— Nobuhiro Watsuki
...I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them...
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
People leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
...a noisy parade of memories that frustrate her because of the way they play themselves out. These memories-it feels like she's back there in the moment, like she has the moment to do over and make different choices than she made. But she can't, because they're just memories and they're set down permanent as if they were chiseled in marble, and so she just has to watch herself do the same things over and over and it's a condemnation if it's anything.
— Alden Bell, The Reapers are the Angels
The streets looked small, of course. The streets that we have only seen as children always do I believe when we go back to them
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
In the dark, dank world of the Tunnels, I would call upon this memory. And there would be a flicker of candlelight. If only for a moment. I closed my eyes, as if my eyelids were the levers of a printing press, etching the fibers into my mind. Memories were outside Cole’s reach. As long as I held them, memories were mine and mine alone.
— Brodi Ashton, Everneath
Feelings are memories. Memories are also feelings.
— Margaret Stohl, Icons
And I never started to plow in my lifeThat some one did not stop in the roadAnd take me away to a dance or picnic.	 I ended up with forty acres;	 I ended up with a broken fiddle—And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,And not a single regret.
— Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
I take you and pile high the memories. Death will break her claws on some I keep.
— Carl Sandburg
Magnus didn't really want this kind of thing this early in the morning - this talk of aching memories and wanting to forget. This conversation needed to end, now.
— Cassandra Clare, The Rise of the Hotel Dumort
Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.
— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers.
— Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
This was me before I knew about anything hard, when my whole life was packed lunches and art projects and spelling quizzes.
— Nina LaCour, Hold Still
And yet, even as she spoke, she knew that she did not wish to come back. not to stay, not to live. She loved the little yellow cottage more than she loved any place on earth. but she was through with it except in her memories. 
— Maud Hart Lovelace, Heaven to Betsy
Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.
— Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief
It is...difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.[E]very memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.
— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
memories were tricky things…they weren’t stable. they changed with perception over time. …they shifted, and [she] understood how the passage of time affected them. the hard working striver might recall his childhood as one filled with misery and hardship marred by the cat calls and mae calling of playground bullies, but later, have a much more forgiving understanding of past injustices. the handmade clothes he had been forced to wear, became a testament to his mother’s love. each patch and stitch a sign of her diligence, instead of a brand of poverty. he would remember father staying up late to help him with his homework – the old old man’s patience and dedication, instead of the sharpness of his temper when he returned home – late- from the factory. it went the other way as well.[she] had scanned thousands of memories of spurned women, whose handsome lovers turned ugly and rude. roman noses, perhaps too pointed. eyes growing small and mean. while the oridnary looking boys who had become their husbands, grew in attractiveness as the years passed, so that when asked if it was love at first site, the women cheerfully answered yes. memories were moving pictures in which meaning was constantly in flux. they were stories people told themselves.
— Melissa de la Cruz, The Van Alen Legacy
The ground was silvery, as if some stars had fallen there.
— Heather O'Neill
But it was smell that carried memory.
— Ann Brashares, My Name Is Memory
and I'm thinking as our bodies meet that I'll remember this forever, and i just hope it's for all the right reasons.
— Steven Herrick, Love, Ghosts, & Facial Hair
Depression is a red herring," said Nariman. "I think a lot about the past, it's true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. and there is not much percentage in the future.
— Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters
How memories lie to us. How time coats the ordinary with gold. How it breaks the heart to go back and attempt to re-live them. How crushed we are when we discover that the gold was merely gold-plating thinly coated over lead, chalk and peeling paint.
— Henry Rollins, Black Coffee Blues
When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending. I feel the warmth and texture and simultaneously I see the flesh unwrap from the layers of fat and disappear. I see the fat disappear from the muscle. I see the muscle disappearing from around the organs and detaching iself from the bones. I see the organs gradually fade into transparency leaving a gleaming skeleton gleaming like ivory that slowly resolves until it becomes dust. I am consumed in the sense of your weight the way your flesh occupies momentary space the fullness of it beneath my palms. I am amazed at how perfectly your body fits to the curves of my hands. If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time I would. If I could open up your body and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours I would. It makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss. It makes me weep to feel the movement of your flesh beneath my palms as you twist and turn over to one side to create a series of gestures to reach up around my neck to draw me nearer. All these memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain.
— David Wojnarowicz
Losing someone is like when the sun comes through a window, moving across the room with each hour, until night falls and all you can do is try to remember the soothing shapes it made.
— Stewart Lewis, You Have Seven Messages
It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer. Everything fades: the shimmer of gold over White Cove; the laughter in the night air; the lavender early morning light on the faces of skyscrapers, which had suddenly become so heroically tall. Every dawn seemed to promise fresh miracles, among other joys that are in short supply these days. And so I will try to tell you, while I still remember, how it was then, before everything changed-that final season of the era that roared.
— Anna Godbersen, Bright Young Things
From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.
— Sue Monk Kidd
The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rockstar and you think, "They'll remember me now," but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Sometimes, for a moment, everything is just as you need it to be. The memories of such moments live in the heart, waiting for the time you need to think of them, if only to remind yourself that for a short while, everything had been fine, and might be so again.
— Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure
The termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories.
— Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel
I know in my life there have been breaches, but I also know that I am very good at blocking out the memories that serve me no purpose.
— Carrie Ryan, The Forest of Hands and Teeth
It never leaves, not with someone we love. Their presence burns too vivid in our memories. Happen that is as it should be, for otherwise we would too easy forget.
— Helen Hollick, The Kingmaking
How strange it is, sometimes, which conversations or events stays with us while so much else melts as fast as April snow.
— Marlena de Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice
Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to "relive" or "reenact" them, especially if they were traumatic.
— Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science
Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room.
— Emily Giffin, Something Borrowed
Yeah, you’re right about having entire rooms full of film and photos… in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage… I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides… I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that’s happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs,” Alecto responded. “People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines… The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I’ve been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to.
— Rebecca McNutt, Smog City
When everything else crumbles to dust, all we have left are the memories. I thought of Ophelia, wandering the theater, mind half gone...Never shall I cut from memory my sweet love's beauty.
— Lisa Mantchev, Perchance to Dream
No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Some of the best memories are made in flip flops.
— Kellie Elmore
Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Mom's everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didn't think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves.
— Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom
My memories are like a shuffled deck of cards, each one coming up at random.
— Brian James, Life is But a Dream
Memories establish the past
— Senses perceive the present
Memories shrink. Like a soap bar used over and over, they become deformed, weaker scented, too slight and slippery to hold.
— Amanda Hodgkinson, 22 Britannia Road
A good fragrance is really a powerful cocktail of memories and emotion.
— Jeffrey Stepakoff, The Orchard
My father spoke with his hands. He was deaf. His voice was in his hands. And his hands contained his memories.
— Myron Uhlberg, Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love
We humans are different - our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them, our recollections in their retelling.
— Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace
But memories got left behind while you kept walking on; every time you had to retrace your steps further to return to your memories, and sometimes it was better not to turn back at all.
— Dalene Matthee, Fiela's Child
When he told it, I remembered. He handed me my past like… like a spear. But I do not know if I should take it. Is it still mine, if I do not want it?
— Rick Riordan, The House of Hades
Some memories are presents that I'm unable to unwrap over and over.
— Brian James, Life is But a Dream
It was no use to tell a person to forget. No matter how hard you tried to put it out of your mind, the hurt would still be there, festering under the forgetfulness, sending poison through your veins.
— Mary Schumann, Strong Enchantments
To see something marvellous with your own eyes - that’s wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you’ll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won’t ever really exist as a whole until you’re together, talking or thinking about that moment ... that’s worth more than one plus one. It’s worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can’t even imagine it.
— Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns
My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important.
— Mary E. Pearson, The Adoration of Jenna Fox
A thousand moments lost because you took them for granted, just because you expected a thousand more.
— Saleem Sharma
What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?
— S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep
You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.
— John Banville, The Infinities
The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about. I myself can only wish that my stories were, indeed, nothing but incredible fabrications. I have stayed alive all these years clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion. I have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. But each time I tried to push them into the dark, they came back stronger and more vivid than ever. Like cancer cells, these memories have taken root in my mind and eaten into my flesh.
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
I am starting to think that maybe memories are like this dessert. I eat it, and it becomes a part of me, whether I remember it later or not.
— Erica Bauermeister, The School of Essential Ingredients
Memories fall like snowflakes upon my dreams. The snowflakes toss and tumble, each different and yet the same.
— Lisa Schroeder, Far from You
Memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.
— Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
She had realized there are only fragments, that 'memories' always consist of fragments the mind puts together into a pattern, adapts a picture staked out early without the need for a conenction with anything that really happened. A great deal is misunderstood by small children, then stored as images that attract similar images, confirming and reinforcing.
— Marianne Fredriksson, Hanna's Daughters
Saffy could tell by the feel of the darkness that Caddy was awake. She said, "Caddy, how far back can you remember?""Oh," said Caddy, "ages. I can remember when I could only lie flat. On my back. I can remember how pleased I was when I learned to roll over.
— Hilary McKay, Saffy's Angel
For me, Mama's cabinet had been full of mysteries and secrets to be puzzled out, like an adventure. For them it had been full of memories. And I had broken all of them.
— Stephanie Burgis, Kat, Incorrigible
We don’t even survive in the memories of the living. Science has destroyed that myth. Whenever we remember something, what we’re doing is remembering the last time we remembered it; our memory doesn’t go back to the original notch, the first one was cut, but to the last one. Human memory is virtual, like that of a computer. When we open a file we’re not opening it as it was when we first created it, but as it was the last time we used it. It is called hypercathexis and is our brain’s most sophisticated recourse when it comes to confronting pain.
— Enrique de Hériz, Lies
Her memories were beads jumbled loose in a box, unstrung.
— Kate Maloy, Every Last Cuckoo
In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.
— W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Ah God! to see the branches stir	Across the moon at Grantchester!	To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten	Unforgettable, unforgotten	River-smell, and hear the breeze	 Sobbing in the little trees.	Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand	Still guardians of that holy land?	The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,	The yet unacademic streamIs dawn a secret shy and cold	Anadyomene, silver-gold?	And sunset still a golden sea	From Haslingfield to Madingley?	And after, ere the night is born,Do hares come out about the corn?	Oh, is the water sweet and cool,	Gentle and brown, above the pool?	And laughs the immortal river still	Under the mill, under the mill?Say, is there Beauty yet to find?	And Certainty? and Quiet kind?	Deep meadows yet, for to forget	The lies, and truths, and pain?… oh! yet	Stands the Church clock at ten to three?	And is there honey still for tea?
— Rupert Brooke, The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.
— Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain
I've been wondering," Isabelle commented reflectively over dessert, "if it is foolish to make new memories when you know you are going to lose them.
— Erica Bauermeister, The School of Essential Ingredients
The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or inspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, if not back to your own neighborhood. To the street where you live. To things you left behind.And that's what you need, what you needed all along.
— Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude
The feelings resembled memories
—  but memories of what? Apparently one can remember things that have never happened.
My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning's the same, the meter's identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it's right and you're wrong.
— Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House
Looking back into childhood is like turning a telescope the wrong way around. Everything appears in miniature, but with a clarity it probably does not deserve; moreover it has become concentrated and stylized, taking shape in symbolism. Thus it is that I sometimes see my infant self as having been set down before a blank slate on which to construct a map or schema of the external world, and as hesitantly beginning to sketch it, with many false starts and much rubbing-out, the anatomy of my universe. Happiness and sorrow, love and friendship, hostility, a sense of guilt and more abstract concepts still, must all find a place somewhere, much as an architect lays out the plan of a house he is designing - hall, dining-room and bedrooms - but must not forget the bathroom. In a child’s map, too, some of the rooms are connected by a serving-hatch, while others are sealed off behind baize doors. How can the fragments possibly be combined to make sense? Yet this map or finished diagram, constructed in the course of ten or twelve years’ puzzling, refuses to be ignored, and for some time to come will make itself felt as bones through flesh, to emerge as the complex organism which adults think of as their philosophy of life. Presumably it has its origins in both heredity and enviorment. So with heredity I shall begin.
— Frances Partridge, Love In Bloomsbury: Memories
Well, memory can play tricks. Most people, I think, tend to remember the good rather than the bad when someone close to them dies.
— Soheir Khashoggi, Nadia's Song
Those are exactly the kind of memories I try to avoid, but they're like abestos: invisible and deadly. You need special gear to get rid of them.
— Kristin Hannah, Comfort & Joy
Yes. I rememb
— Meljean Brook, The Iron Duke
When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory
— Marcel Proust
Sometimes moments in life are so perfect you want to freeze frame them
—  capture them within your soul forever so they never fade away—they burn themselves into your being until they’re a part of who you are.
The little house is not too smallTo shelter friends who come to call.Though low the roof and small its spaceIt holds the Lord's abounding grace,And every simple room may beEndowed with happy memory.The little house, severly plain,A wealth of beauty may contain.Within it those who dwell may findHigh faith which makes for peace of mind,And that sweet understanding whichCan make the poorest cottage rich.The little house can hold all thingsFrom which the soul's contentment springs.'Tis not too small for love to grow,For all the joys that mortals know,For mirth and song and that delightWhich make the humblest dwelling bright.
— Edgar A. Guest
Heroes in fact die with one's youth. They are pinned like butterflies to the setting board of early memories—the time when skies were always blue, the sun shone and the air was filled with the sounds and scents of grass being cut. I find myself still as desperate to read the Sussex score in the stop-press as ever I was; but I no longer worship heroes, beings for whom the ordinary scales of human values are inadequate. One learns that as one grows up, so do the gods grow down. It is in many ways a pity: for one had thought that heroes had no problems of their own. Now one knows different!
— Alan Ross, Cricket Heroes: 21 leading writers, members of the Cricket Writers Club, on great cricketers
You can outrun your memories, but sometime, you will have to stop. And when you do, there will always be Stepmother, waiting to be remembered.
— Franny Billingsley, Chime
Most uncomfortable situations brings at times most precious memories....
— Adil Adam Memon
I slipped on a turtleneck, laughing when my head became stuck in the turtle part. If they weren't called turtlenecks, I wouldn't have worn them.
— Augusten Burroughs, A Wolf at the Table
I remember remembering,” she muttered, sitting down with a heavy sigh; she pulled her legs up to wrap her arms around her knees. “Feelings. Emotions. Like I have all these shelves in my head, labeled for memories and faces, but they’re empty. As if everything before this is just on the other side of a white curtain. Including you.
— James Dashner, The Maze Runner
They're all true. They all could have happened.
— Ellen Sussman, French Lessons
We walked into the arena together with him reaching out his arm and wrapping it around my waist. He pulled me into him, smelling the aroma around him. The scent was familiar like I was with him before. Although I was positive that I’d never seen this man, something still ached at me. Was it a longing of a piece of my past starting to take effect?
— Millicent Ashby, The Glass Serpent
I pretended like all the oranges rolling everywhere were her happy memories and they were looking for a new person to stick to so they didn't get wasted.
— Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English
Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
She filed those moments away like precious documents, wore them smooth with memory, collected them like bits of prayers.
— Jennifer E. Smith, The Comeback Season
What a host of little incidents, all deep-buried in the past -- problems that had once been urgent, arguments that had once been keen, anecdotes that were funny only because one remembered the fun. Did any emotion really matter when the last trace of it had vanished from human memory; and if that were so, what a crowd of emotions clung to him as to their last home before annihilation? He must be kind to them, must treasure them in his mind before their long sleep.
— James Hilton, Good-Bye, Mr. Chips
Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Prince of Mist
My prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of perserving certain moments for prosperity , and as time moved forwards I also came to see what a powerful influence these framed scenes exerted over us as we went about our daily lives.To watch my uncle pose my brother a maths problem , and at the same time to see him in a picture taken thirty-two years earlier ; to watch my father scanning the newspaper and trying , with a half-smile , to catch the tail of a joke rippling across the crowded room,and at that very same moment to see a picture of him to me that my grandmother had framed and frozen these memories so that we could weave them into the present.When,in the tones ordinarily preserved for discussing the founding of a nation , my grandmother spoke of my grandfather who had died so young,and pointed at the frames on the tables and the walls , it seemed that she , likes me , was pulled in two directions , wanting to get on with life but also longing to capture the moment of perfection , savouring the ordinary life but still honouring the ideal.But even as I pondered these dilemmas-if you plucked a special moment from life and framed it , were you defying death , decay and the passage of time. or were you submitting to them ?-I grew very bored with them.pg.13
— Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City
They waited awhile before lighting the candles; the gloom allowed the past to slip cozily into the present. But the memories were of a time that was gone and didn't overshadow the present. But the memories were vivid, and they made the freinds feel both young and old...When Chrsitanne finally lit the candles and they saw one another clearly again, she was happy to see in the old faces of the others the young faces they had come across in their memories. we store our youth wihtin us, we can go back to it and find ourselves in it, but it is past--melancholy filled their hearsts, and sympahty, for one another and for themsleves.
— Bernhard Schlink
A boy from Brooklyn used to cruise on summer nights.As soon as he’d hit sixty he’d hold his hand out the window,cupping it around the wind. He’d been assuredthis is exactly how a woman’s breast feels when you putyour hand around it and apply a little pressure. Now he knew,and he loved it. Night after night, again and again, untilthe weather grew cold and he had to roll the window up.For many years afterwards he was perpetually attemptingto soar. One winter’s night, holding his wife’s breastin his hand, he closed his eyes and wanted to weep.He loved her, but it was the wind he imagined now.As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refusedto abbreviate it. He loved sweet white butter. He oftenpretended to be playing the organ. On one of his last mornings,he noticed the shape of his face molded in the pillow.He shook it out, but the next morning it reappeared.
— Mary Ruefle
Like all of my important memories, it has a potency that has influenced the pocket of time that holds it, so I can remember that particular Saturday afternoon, even though in many ways it was no different from any other. I can remember, for example, what van der Glick was wearing as she stepped out of the elevator, which was a dress covered with clownish polka dots. Rainie would make these heartbreaking stabs at femininity; indeed, she still does. It's not that she doesn't possess a woman's body now, and didn't posses a girl's body then. But clothes never seemed to fit her correctly, and the more girlish they were, the worse they would hang.
— Paul Quarrington, The Ravine
were the last words that I wrote for you enough to tell youthat in my death the light that shone through my painful darknesswas a blinding vision of your eternal smile?cold scalpel's steel whispers tear at my very coreas I cling to my memories of you...
— Philippe Xavier
So, we skipped Annabel, and discussed condoms. I said I liked the orange ones, and we ended our talk in laughter.
— Steven Herrick, Love, Ghosts, & Facial Hair
Best memories never hurt, with good memories an individual can pass his whole life without depending on others...
— Ritesh Shrivastav
Memories don't need logic.
— Nikita Dudani
It takes just one day to remember one day! Mind today, for one day, you shall remember one day
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Memories are fragile, you try to grab them and they skitter away in various directions. Trying to gather them together to write them out is difficult, they resist, get clouded and escape as wisps of smoke. Nothing seems as crystal clear as it once was, a milky film of opacity envelopes everything. Odd details stand out in one’s mind, not a continuum. A fragrance, an odour, the smell of toast burning perhaps or whiff of jasmine, a shade of pink, a flower pressed between the pages of a book, brings on a sharp burst of memories that drown you with their immediacy.
— Kiran Manral, The Face At the Window
Memories shared change. You can add what you learned to the memory and it becomes easier to live with or benefit by.
— Brent M. Jones
Aging is something! It always makes you remember yesterday!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Around me shone the kitchen I'd worked in each day: the copper pans hung neatly, the scratched wooden table and neat blue plates set in rows on the dresser. I got up to rake out the cinders and suddenly clutched at the black stone of the hearth. How long was it since as a new girl I'd first spiked a fowl and set it to roast on that fire? What great sides of beef had we roasted on the smoke-jack, while bacon dangled on hooks, and meat juices basted puddings as light as eggy clouds? Never, in all my ten years at Mawton, had I let that fire die out. Every dawn, in winter or summer, I'd riddled the dying embers and set new kindling on the top. I touched the rough stone and let my cheek press on its everlasting warmth, wishing I could take that loyal fire with me. Foolish, I know, but a fire is a cook's truest friend. It was a good fire at Mawton: blackened with hundreds of years of smoking hot dinners.I think no heathen ever worshipped fire like a cook. So I kissed the smutty hearth wall and packed instead my little tinderbox, to light new fires I knew not where.
— Martine Bailey, An Appetite for Violets
If the vibrant and frolicking merry-go-round of our daily living has been ousted by an eerie void of an intractable vacuum, only inspiriting memories may shore up our inner world. ("Only silence remained ")
— Erik Pevernagie
Making sensible choices is short-term thinking
—  they never make for good memories.
I understand that sometimes the only way we can survive our own memories is to shape them into a story that makes sense out of events that seem inexplicable.
— Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom
You are scared to relive them, the vulnerability of succumbing. So you think to shove them into a box at the back of your closet makes them less of a ticking time bomb?
— Roshni Dulani
We were hereAnd our memories are as dear to us as every slow motion moment or held breathSo remember every instance before deathEvery first kiss, first dance, near miss, last chance, yes, no, maybe soLet us go the distance once moreLet us remember all the moments that were and were notLike the point is something we can get and what we can get is what we gotBecause all we have are the times between the moments we connect each dotSo live and rememberBurn like an ember capable of starting firesLike each moment inspires the nextLike memories are the context we put ourselves inSo that life becomes the next of kin we need to notify in case of a big bang or Extinction level eventLet now be our adventLet us live like we meant itLet us burn like we mean itBecause this world doesn't give a shit if we end in a train wreck or a car crashIf our story ends with a dot or dashIf we were dust or ashBecause all we were is all we’ll beAnd all we are is the in-between of so far, so goodSo forget every would, could, or should notForget remembering how we forgotLive like a plot twist exists now and in memoryBecause we burn brightOur light leaves scars on the sunLet no one say we will be undone by time's passingThe memories we are amassing will stand as testamentThat somehow we bent minds around the conceptThat we see others within ourselvesThat self-knowledge can't be found on bookshelvesSo who we are has no bearing on how we appearLook directly into every mirrorRealize our reflection is the first sentence to a storyAnd our story starts:"We were here."﻿
— Shane L. Koyczan
This is a cemetery of memories and I'm grave robbing.
— Jocelyn White, The Ezekiel Experience
In going back we must take our present selves with us: the mind has taken a different colour, and this is thrown back upon our past.
— William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago
Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments, only later do they make themselves known, from their scars.
— Chris Marker
Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and doors were creaking open a little, to air the ghosts trapped inside it.
— Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Have you every clawed at the gates of your memory, desperately trying to grab a piece that’s slowly disappearing? Have you ever run into the fog chasing someone who is becoming one with it? Have you revisited your most difficult hour only ‘cause you need your heart to ache, your body convulse? If you have then you know that pain makes us powerfully alive even if it breaks our hearts over and over again. The compulsion to chase a painful fading memory is all but human. It cannot be fought. It shouldn’t.
— Nidhie Sharma
Memories, they make us who were are, slowly etching themselves into our faces, one wrinkle at a time. Every wrinkle…a memory of someone we loved, of someone we lost, of the lives we wished we’d lived, of the things we did..both right and wrong
— Nidhie Sharma
Give me an old house full of memories and I will give you hundred novels!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one.
— Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt
Years later, I remember the waxy taste of the yellow paint, the papery taste of splintered wood, the sharp metallic of the graphite.
— Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir
...and the worse the memory, the stronger its stranglehold on the present.
— Eliza Granville, Gretel and the Dark
And they had nothing, except of course memories, their own, and those passed down by their mothers and mothers' mothers. A nation's memory.
— NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names
The womb of the world births us. My filth comes from the same earthwork that gives rise to all stories. My interior light connects me with all the other creatures that inhabit this world of rocks, air, grass, woods, and water. My genetic code links me inextricably with all of nature. I enter the medley in the river of life with the ability to respond as life unfolds before my childlike eyes. My homemade medicinal poultice might not be of any benefit to other people. Nonetheless, we should each write our stories because each of us aims to attain a greater degree of awareness of our own authenticity. We owe a moral obligation to our family, friends, and ourselves as well as to the community to make a determined effort to wring the most out of life. We must applaud all efforts to investigate the human condition. Even if my writing amounts to nothing more than a clumsy attempt to travel the same tracks other people burnished with much more insight, clarity, precision, and style, it is an act of self-definition to ascribe to any philosophy. Philosophy represents a living charter; it is a life of action.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
There is much that I remember but which is painful to dwell on. I see no need to write about these things. They are over and must be accepted, made sense of and forgiven, afforded no more than their proper place in a long life in which I have always known that happiness is a gift, not a right.
— P.D. James, Time To Be In Earnest: A Fragment Of Autobiography
It is said that nothing in our lives is ever lost, that nothing can prevent its having been. That is why, so very often the weight of the past lies ineluctably upon the present. But that is why it is so real in memory, so wholly itself, so far beyond replacement.
— Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil
I have many wonderful memories of this days we had together. It would make me happy to know that at least a few of your memories of me are good ones. I wonder if you ever think about sitting under that oak tree, with the cicadas buzzing, and, at night, the crickets. Or how the ice used to cover the blueberry bushes in the winter, giving them that dreamy look. Or how we used to sell the pies for your mother at the roadside stand.I still think of you whenever I see blueberries.
— Mary Simses, The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Cafe
I have many wonderful memories of those days we had together. It would make me happy to know that at least a few of your memories of me are good ones. I wonder if you ever think about sitting under that oak tree, with the cicadas buzzing, and, at night, the crickets. Or how the ice used to cover the blueberry bushes in the winter, giving them that dreamy look. Or how we used to sell the pies for your mother at the roadside stand.I still think of you whenever I see blueberries.
— Mary Simses, The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Cafe
Every time he tries to fly high, but his memories always hold his broken wings.
— Vaishal sheth
Sometimes the memories we cling hardest to are the ones that hurt us the most.
— Elizabeth May, The Falconer
Each new day, our minds grow older; the better or bitter daily lesson that makes our minds grow older is the matter!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Each new day, our minds grow older; the mediocre, bitter or better daily lesson that makes our minds grow older is the matter!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Her grandparents’ house was an old crammed up space just like all the others there, but to Sofia it had the luxuries of a palace and the reverence of a church.
— Effrosyni Moschoudi, The Lady of the Pier - The Ebb
And all these things she always counted on to revisit, they made up a map, the map of a true home. It was the only place where she felt she had an identity and a history behind her.
— Effrosyni Moschoudi, The Lady of the Pier - The Ebb
Moments always blossom more beautifully in memories.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
The most evocative life memories, which produced a synesthesia of emotions, consist of a host of small pleasures intertwined with the homespun stitches of love, affection, kindness, humility, and appreciation of nature.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls