c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Looking at things is never time wasted. If your children want to stand and stare, let them. When I was marvelling at the beauty of a painting or enjoying a great view it did not occur to me that the experience, however intense, would be of value many years later. But there it has remained, tucked away in hidden bits of my mind and now it comes, shouldering aside even the most passionate love affairs.
— Diana Athill
She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.
— Ray Bradbury, I Sing the Body Electric! & Other Stories
Those are the facts but not the truth, which does not even speak the same language.
— Sonja Livingston, Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls and Goddesses
No two moments are identical in a conscious being
— Henri Bergson
That echo. It played in his head at unexpected moments, repeating certain sounds and making nonsense of them. But could you remember an echo? Memory itself was like another kind of echo, everything duplicating endlessly, in shadow versions of itself.
— Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer
The flowers in Tibet were always taller, more fragrant and vivid. Her descriptions, imprecise but unchanging from year to year lead me to an inevitable acceptance that her past was unequaled by our present lives. She would tell me of knee-deep fields of purple, red and white- plants never named or pointed out to during our years in India and Nepal- that over time served to create an idea of her fatherland, phayul, as a riotous garden. I pictured her wilderness paradise by comparing them not to the marigolds, daises or bluebells I crushed with my fingers, but to the shape of household artefacts around me: lollipop, broom, bottle. Disparate objects that surrendered to and influenced the idea, space and hope of a more abundant and happy place.
— Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, A Home in Tibet
When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later... later there is uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. It's a bit like the black box airplanes carry to record what happens in a crash. If nothing goes wrong, the tape erases itself. So if you do crash, it's obvious why you did; if you don't, then the log of your journey is much less clear.
— Julian Barnes
It's precarious to hang onto the veracity of memory because its edges are smoothed by the river of time.
— Khang Kijarro Nguyen
We try so hard to put our mark on things, we like to tell ourselves that what we do has import or will last. But the truth is, we're all just passing through. So little survives us. And when we're gone, it's simply the memory of others that keeps our time here alive. And when they're gone... That's why - when I go - I'm asking that my dust gets tossed on the water. Because ends up floating away.
— Douglas Kennedy, Leaving the World
It is a long time ago. So many lives ago--I get them all confused, don’t you?
— Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt
He had talked to hundreds of witnesses. And he knew that if someone felt pressured, they would try too hard, and their imagination would fill what their memory couldn't recover.
— Chelsea Cain, Heartsick
How fickle it is, memory— preferring some days to others, granting first a blue sky, offering next the sound of laughter, swelling our remembrances until a largeness seeps into the grain of things and memory itself becomes billowed and flapping.
— Sonja Livingston, Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls and Goddesses
The feeling of loathing had as yet no permanence or strength in the dog’s soul. The newly awakened joy of life transformed every sensation into a great joke, into gaiety. Nimrod kept on barking, but the tone of it had changed imperceptibly, had become a parody of what it had been - an attempt to express the incredible wonder of that capital enterprise, life, so full of unexpected encounters, pleasures, and thrills.
— Bruno Schulz
Rucksacks. What do people whose life stops here take with them? Makina could see their rucksacks crammed with time. Amulets, letters, sometimes a huapango violin, sometimes a jaranera harp. Jackets. People who left took jackets because they’d been told that if there was one thing they could be sure of over there, it was the freezing cold, even if it was desert all the way. They hid what little money they had in their underwear and stuck a knife in their back pocket. Photos, photos, photos. They carried photos like promises but by the time they came back they were in tatters.
— Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World
It was haunted
—  but real hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts finally
She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
I loved you without knowing it, and I looked for your memory.In empty houses I entered with a lantern to steal your portrait
— Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
The more she tried to forget, the more she remembered.
— T.K. Kiser, The Firebrand Legacy
I made a discovery. It was cold enough to make my eyes water, and I found out that If I kept them almost closed, the moisture diffused the lights, so that everything - the Moon, the stars, the street lamp - seemed to have halos and points of scattered light around it. The snow-banks seemed to glitter like a sea of spun sugar, and all the stars were woven together by a lace of incandescence, so that I was walking through a Universe so wild, so wonderful that my heart nearly broke with its beauty."For years, I carried that time and place in mind. It's still there. But the thing is, the Universe didn't make it. I did. I saw it, but I saw it because I made myself see it. I took the stars, which are distant suns, and the night, which is the Earth's shadow, and the snow, which is water undergoing a state-change, and I took the tears in my eyes, and I made a wonderland. No one else has ever been able to see it. No one else has ever been able to go there. Not even I can ever return to it physically, it lies thirty-eight years in the past, in the eye-level perspective of a child, its stereoscopic accuracy based on the separation between the eyes of a child. In only one place does it actually exist. In my mind Elizabeth - in my life."But I will die, and where will it be, then?"Elizabeth looked up at him. "In mind mind a little? Along with the rest of you?"Hawks looked at her. He reached out and, bending forward as tenderly as a child receiving a snowflake to hold, gently enclosed her in his arms. "Elizabeth, Elizabeth," he said. "I never realized that. I never realized what you were letting me do.""I love you.
— Algis Budrys
But that day it was raining, and since they couldn't very well sit on the rooftop in the rain to watch the flotilla parade, they stayed in the little room that led to the roof. It had just one tiny window through which the gray light of day filtered in. They sat on the floor, and Lorenzo's senses were aroused by the sound of the rain falling outside, the musky smell of his own body, and the fragrant scent of Caterina's hair. A single blonde strand wound down her slim neck.They kissed, taking off their rain-washed summer clothes so that their bodies pressed, naked, against one another. Long, delicate lovemaking. Caresses, kisses, shivers, and sighs of delight.Lorenzo would have gladly spend the rest of his life preserved in that single moment, as if in amber, abandoning reality to live in the memory of that one single day.
— Riccardo Bruni, The Lion and the Rose
We paw at nostalgia even before we hit twenty, wanting a holiday that never happened, a wholesomeness that could not survive in the wild.
— Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring
I remembered his laugh, like a flock of crows taking off
— Maggie Stiefvater, Shiver
He'd done this hundreds of times: done a job, been drugged with a narcotic that erased his short term memory, and dumped in a seedy hole in the wall locale, where when he climbed out, he would have to figure out where he was, find a payphone, and call in for his next job.
— Jennifer Arnett, Agent Chandler, Retired: A short story
You cannot forget, despite the effort to block the memories. These horrific remnants of your past will still remain in your brain, they will follow you wherever you go. They are the things that have scarred you.
— athena_griffinclaw_erudite
It is easy to create a memory, but it is almost impossible to forget.
— Debasish Mridha
War ends at the moment when peace permanently wins out. Not when the articles of surrender are signed or the last shot is fired, but when the last shout of a sidewalk battle fades, when the next generation starts to wonder whether the whole thing ever really happened. World War II ended as war always ends -- by trailing off into nothingness and doubt. Its final monument has never been seen by mortal eyes. It's a phantom image at the edge of a rumor: an unmarked grave in the depths of the South American jungle where a weird and decrepit old man, half forgotten by the world, at last entered the lists of oblivion.
— Lee Sandlin, Losing the War
We all have an eraser incorporated within us, a delete key, but we forget how to use it. Ho’oponopono helps us to remember the power that we have to choose between erasing (letting go) or reacting, being happy or suffering. It is only a matter of choice in every moment of our lives.
— Mabel Katz, The Easiest Way
We may deny the truth of our childhoods while we are living them, but we one day realize the truth of our parents as readily as we do that of Santa. Neither are as perfect as our memories would have them…
— Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring
Maybe I have never had the Christmas I remember, since we never remember the event itself but just the last time we revisited the memory. I have woven together a few dozen scraps (the Sears catalog, my father videoing everything we did, Christmas parties and visits with Santa) and pretended they amount to one perfect, cohesive moment, but I am as guilty as baby-boomers, who dictated unconsciously that all the songs they listened to in 1963 would be the timeless Christmas standards of today.
— Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring
Your memory is a monster; you forget -it doesn't. It simply files thingsaway. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
— John Irving
We want so badly to be happy – to live the kinds of lives that we always hoped we’d live – that we give gifts to ourselves by remembering things not as they were, but as we wish they were.
— Dathan Auerbach, Penpal
And I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.
— June Jordan
We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.
— Patti Smith
Sometimes forgetting is the gift that we give ourselves
— Dathan Auerbach, Penpal
Every day it’s something worse being predicted. Mearth says that sooner or later copyright on books will be all in the past because they’ll all be available electronically. She says that electric cars will replace gasoline-powered cars. She says that something called drones will be used to watch the entire country, she talks a lot about something called nanotechnology, and 3-dimensional printing and cellular phones being implanted into peoples’ minds and all available careers being replaced by robots and human cloning and overpopulation and film becoming obsolete, cellular phones making regular telephones obsolete and LED lighting replacing everything and eventually she says that the planet will collapse and become an apathetic wreck,” Alecto replied rapidly, his run-on sentence sounding sinister and dangerous. “Mearth says that eventually people will be able to see inside the minds of everyone.
— Rebecca McNutt, Super 8: The Sequel to Smog City
Time, the thing we can't beat back... Yet, time is also what it takes to heal, what it takes for certain memory cells to die. Maybe time doesn't heal. Maybe it doesn't even pass. We pass through time, and come out stunned, so rage, and memory, are blurred.
— Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues
Dark, cool, musty, smoky, where light fell funny and everyone looked like someone you knew or wanted to know. Or, more likely, wanted to forget.
— David Baldacci, Memory Man
There is only one moment; its events are infinitely unfolding, increasing at every passing second—meaning that they were somehow compressed before. This moment was never smaller, but less beauty was exposed in the physical form, yet still this flower blooms. I think we tend to see time as the events alone; in this sense, we view objects as a means of measurement to time. But we forget the place of events in time is change. I am the measurement to my own happiness; time is the breadth of that beauty, and that beauty is the measurement of this moment’s grandeur. Somehow compressed, potential beauty was enfolded infinitely from the start of time, and now waits in vain for its fullest blossoming.The fact that there is a progression to time proves that time is not infinite; you can’t approach infinity. Time is more like a dot, expanding on a plane that is infinite; but that dot may as well not be growing, because the plane that its on is growing too. Stagnant, this explains what we call “now” that moment, ever unfolding; matter changes, but not the moment; the only proof that a past exists is our memories. What did it feel like to be four? Like now. My memories of a past are an illusion, because they take place in the now, the one moment.
— Matthew Holbert
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
But it’s a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go. The adrenaline that let our ancestors escape the sabertooth tiger sears into the meat of our brains the extraordinary, the loud. The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
— Mary Karr
Jehanne said that it would always be like this. That I would always be young and beautiful in her memory, and she in mine. That I would never grow resentful, never be tempted to betray her. That she would never grow restless and fickle, and see to replace me. So you see, not exactly the sentiments of a great and terrible love affair.
— Jacqueline Carey, Naamah's Blessing
You never know what the vodka will bring,” I laughed.“Oh, like the time you caught my hair on fire at the candlelight party in Mel’s basement! That was the craziest thing that I ever had happen to me. If you hadn’t switched to water, I would have been bald!”-Cora, Nessa
— Andrea Heltsley, Dissolve
In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory
—  the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
The memory of his voice made her feel warm and happy, though she could not explain why
— Anamika Mishra, VoiceMates - A Novel
Memories extend our lives backward through time, making them feel longer.
— Dathan Auerbach, Penpal
It would cut into him at unpredictable moments, like a gutting knife made of colored light.
— David Baldacci, Memory Man
...make sure if you're working hard at something it's in a subject you actually want to remember something about ten years later.
— Felicia Day, You're Never Weird on the Internet
I just want to sleep. The whole point of not talking about it, of silencing the memory, is to make it go away. It won't. I'll need brain surgery to cut it out of my head.
— Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
By remembering it too often I have blurred the memory itself.
— C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.
— Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
We are so strangely made
—  the memories that could make us happy pass away
The ants Geiser recently observed under a dripping fir tree are not concerned with what anyone might know about them; nor were the dinosaurs, which died out before a human being set eyes on them. All the papers, whether on the wall or on the carpet, can go. Who cares about the Holocene? Nature needs no names. Geiser knows that. The rocks do not need his memory.
— Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene
A photograph is the best split-second decision one can make!
— Annie O'Reilly
IphWas a larvorium and a violet:A grave in Reason's early spring. And yetIt missed the gist of the whole thing; it missedWhat mostly interests the preterist;For we die every day; oblivion thrivesNot on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,And our best yesterdays are now foul pilesOf crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.I'm ready to become a floweretOr a fat fly, but never, to forget.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
May the ears of Canada never grow deaf to the plea of widows and orphans and our crippled men for care and support. May the eyes of Canada never be blind to that glorious light which shines upon our young national life from the deeds of those "who counted not their lives dear unto themselves," and may the lips of Canada never be dumb to tell to future generations the tales of heroism which will kindle the imagination and fire the patriotism of children that are yet unborn.
— Frederick George Scott
And I try to remember if this happened before, because this is a memory I would want to keep.But there is no echo of it in my mind.
— Beth Revis, The Body Electric
So much of a novelist’s writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.
— Graham Greene
A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus--all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I have no idea how many stars he saw in the sky.
— Jorge Luis Borges
Hands are difficult. You would think they would be just five quick lines, but no, they have personalities as intimate as faces. Elizabeth's hands, for instance—they are fine hands, with long fingers that remind me of tapered candles. A person one has loved—the memory of their hands. Did they flutter or sit still? Dry? Moist? Cool on a hot forehead? What? That is what I wish to express in my paintings. The memory—of the movement—of very particular hands, even though they appear to be unmoving on canvas.
— Sarah Ruhl, In the Next Room, or the vibrator play
Happiness is like good health: when you have it, you don’t notice it. But as the years go by, oh, the memories, the memories of happiness past!
— Mikhail Bulgakov
I didn't let what I wanted to do become a made up memory that I looked back on years down the road and wished it was real.
— S.A. Tawks, Misadventurous
...and Věra said that every time we reached the page which described the snow falling through the branches of the trees, soon to shroud the entire forest floor, I would look up at her and ask: But if it's all white, how do the squirrels know where they've buried their hoard?... Those were your very words, the question which constantly troubled you. How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what it is we find in the end?
— W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
I find it incredibly amazing how at every sunset, the sky is a different shade. No cloud is ever in the same place. Each day is a new masterpiece. A new wonder. A new memory.
— Sanober  Khan
Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera—things like songs and moonlight and kisses—were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good. That was good.
— Stephen King, Lisey's Story
She knew that she had a tendency to allow her mind to wander, but surely that's what made the world interesting. One thought led to another, one memory triggered another. How dull it would be, she thought, not to be reminded of the interconnectedness of everything, how dull for the present not to evoke the past, for here not to imply there.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Novel Habits of Happiness
Bad days my memory functions no better than an out-of-focus kaleidoscope, but other days me recall is painfully perfect.
— Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version
Jude used to try to make me laugh, and when I'd crack a smile he'd keep the joke going , like breath on an ember, making it grow into a fit of giggles that'd echo around the whole forest and make all the birds in the trees quiet.
— Stephanie Oakes, The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly
What are any of our lives but the shapes we force them into. Memory doesn't come to us of its own; we go after it, pull it into sunlight and make of it what we need, what we're driven towards, what we imagine, changing the world again and again with each new quarry, each descent, each morning.
— James Sallis, Bluebottle
A memory is never as good as a moment.
— A.J. Compton, The Counting-Downers
I'm rambling again. Wandering off the point. But this is the true story of my wasted life...
— Mordecai Richler
So it enables the voice of Robert Stack or someone else like him to do for us what it needs to, which is remind us that every moment of our lives is plugged in. Every moment is crucial. And if we recognize this and embrace it, we will one day be able to look back and understand and feel and regret and reminisce and, if we are lucky, cherish.
— M.O. Walsh
It is such a strange fact that memories of people are more loyal and more faithful than the people themselves! When a person dies or leaves us, his memories yet stay with us!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
A memory is a luminous miniature, like the hologram of the princess, in that movie, that the faithful robot carried in his circuits from galaxy to galaxy. The sadness inherent in any memory comes from the fact that its object is forgetting. All movement, the great horizon, the journey, is a spasm of forgetting, which bends in the bubble of memory. Memory is always portable, it is always in the hands of a wandering automaton.
— César Aira
These are the moments that make the dot-to-dot pictures of our past
—  everything else is simply filling in the gaps.
The sadness inherent in any memory comes from the fact that its object is forgetting.
— César Aira
But it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and allowed my mind to relax entirely; then it would let go of the map of the place where I had fallen asleep and, when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was; all I had, in its original simplicity, was the sense of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal; I was more bereft than a caveman; but then the memory - not yet of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been - would come to me like help from on high to pull me out of the void from which I could not have got out on my own; I passed over centuries of civilization in one second, and the image confusedly glimpsed of oil lamps, then of wing-collar shirts, gradually recomposed my self's original features.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
What I know are simple truths. I know that the fabric of memory is reinforced by stories, rent by silences. I know that power dreads memory. I know that memory outlasts power's viciousness. I know . . . that a voiceless man is as good as dead.
— Okey Ndibe, Arrows of Rain
That's what we've been taught, this is the underpinning of all European culture-this firm belief that there are no secrets that won't sooner or later come to light. Who was it that said it? Jesus? No, Pascal, I think it was… so naïve. But this faith has been nurtured for centuries; it has sprouted its own mythology: the cranes of Ibycus, manuscripts don't burn. An ontological faith in the fundamental knowability of every human deed. The certainty that, as they now teach journalism majors, you can find everything on the Internet. As if the Library of Alexandria never existed. Or the Pogruzhalsky arson, when the whole historical section of the Academy of Sciences' Public Library, more than six-hundred thousand volumes, including the Central Council archives from 1918, went up in flames. That was in the summer of 1964; Mom was pregnant with me already, and almost for an entire month afterward, as she made her way to work at the Lavra, she would get off the trolleybus when it got close to the university and take the subway the rest of the way: above ground, the stench from the site of the fire made her nauseous. Artem said there were early printed volumes and even chronicles in that section-our entire Middle Ages went up in smoke, almost all of the pre-Muscovite era. The arsonist was convicted after a widely publicized trial, and then was sent to work in Moldova's State Archives: the war went on. And we comforted ourselves with "manuscripts don't burn."Oh, but they do burn. And cannot be restored.
— Oksana Zabuzhko, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
No one ever forgets a talk they had that lasted through the night.
— Marty Rubin
The beauty of today may not be realised until it becomes tomorrow’s memory
— Steven Aitchison
Time passes. I drift in and out. As if I cease to be, until I remember to exist again.
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
Putting the past behind you isn't like stuffing something in the back of a drawer or trimming a loose thread. The past has a life of its own.
— Maggie Mitchell, Pretty Is
And he ate up all her vision, as he had done the first day she saw him so long ago.
— Lawren Leo, Love's Shadow: Nine Crooked Paths
A man’s real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.
— Alexander Smith
The easy assumption that we have remembered the most important people and events and have preserved the most valuable evidence is immediately trumped by our inability to know what we have forgotten.
— Wendell Berry
Preservation of the past has been one of humankind’s chief preoccupations for centuries, although I am not convinced much of it is worth preserving.
— Chris Flynn
I would give anything to have that memory back--to see what it was like between us when we loved each other enough to believe it was forever.
— Colleen Hoover, Never Never: Part Two
Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.
— Gilles Deleuze
No one can soothe my inner being like you. No one can make me look to the future with such excitement like you did. No one can understand me, fulfill me, fit me like you did." ~Emma Ranstein
— Lindsay Detwiler, Voice of Innocence
Sometimes we are written down in books. Or, someone tells a story in which our name figures. And so we live on, through someone else’s voice…These are the indelible marks others make of us, like the watermarks of high tides, names carved into barks, or stamps branded onto belongings. For what else is history but the collected voices of others, who sing a chorus of what once was. It is not words but voices that are the inscriptions seared onto pages, into minds, of the fragments others glean, as we live our lives in passing.Flitting and fl eeting, we rub off as we move through, and in our wake is cast the dust of the stars that we become. And sometimes it is caught on the fingers of others, and they press that gold to their lips, where it glistens, an eternal testimony to the fact that they adored us: So we, those of us whoremember, we grow more golden as we age, as if cast into statues that commemorate the splendor of those who loved us, and those we were privilegedto love.
— Samantha Bruce-Benjamin, The Westhampton Leisure Hour and Supper Club
The feelings that still linger, decade after decade, aren’t just the residue of a love lost. They are as real as the first day I told her I loved her." ~Corbin Jones, Voice of Innocence
— Lindsay Detwiler, Voice of Innocence
The problem with memories is they get more valuable with time, 	and the places we keep them get weaker with age.
— Michael Xavier
For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, "pinging" pebbles at an empty can.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
The experience of life should mature you. It is your choice to transform a memory into a wound or wisdom.
— Sadghuru
I still notice the burned house, mornings, when I walk along the beach. "Well, obviously I do not notice the house. What I notice is what remains of the house. One is still prone to think of a house as a house, however, even if there is not remarkably much left of it.
— David Markson
Sentiments, as I have found, can be harvested from places where our memories are fondest.
— Fennel Hudson, A Writer's Year - Fennel's Journal - No. 3
Every work cancels the dark. Every work is a hymn from the other side of memory to a memory that is spellbound. Beauty is death's gift to vulgar life so that it can live in beauty.
— Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]
It may not seem like much - a few kisses in the dark - but it was enough to burn a hole like an ulcer in my heart.
— Jean Kwok, Girl in Translation
It's a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man's life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness.
— John Steinbeck
Memory of the knife will be gone when the flesh is gone.
— John Steinbeck
The enchantments of the past must always become the disenchantments of the future. But memory, a preservative, may intervene. The embalmer of original enchantments, it is the only human faculty that can outwit the advance of chronological time. Art, the embalmer of memory, is the only human vocation in which the time regained by memory can be permanently fixed.
— Howard Moss, The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust
It felt like the times were good, like we were remembering a time before Rachel died, even though things were never this good then, because they were just normal, and ordinary is never the kind if good you remember.
— Zoe Whittall, Bottle Rocket Hearts
Memories wasn't a place, memories was in the mind.
— Ernest J. Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
I thought I can throw away all my memories but whenever I tell my mind to do it, memories stick it more...!!
— Doha Asrir
Time thins the cloth of memory. As the ages pass, its rich colors fade. Strong wool is beaten by the elements until the pattern of its lesson disintegrates, leaving holes in the truth it was meant to carry on. Even the stains of blood bend and bleed, leaving but faded blotches without meaning, mere shadows of lessons that came before, their warnings lost within the obscure impression that remains.
— Melissa McPhail, The Dagger of Adendigaeth
I am remembering something. At first it comes to me as a feeling. It is comforting. It is a place I want to be. It is home. Is it the memory of a dream? It is indistinct, but real. I am holding only a thread. And I do not want to let go.
— Richard Payment, For Want of Wonders
Fear no more as long as her memory surrounds you like a ghost…cry no more as long as she weeps for you like a willow.
— Munia Khan
Missing someone is the reverberating echo of everything beautiful about her—her laugh, her song, her touch, her smell, the power of her words, and the constant shadow that lingers on as her perfect image in your memory.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
I thought if I could touch this place or feel it this brokenness inside me might start healing. Out here its like I'm someone else, I thought that maybe I could find myself if I could just come in I swear I'll leave. Won't take nothing but a memory from the house that built me.
— Miranda Lambert, Miranda Lambert - Revolution
My hate is stronger than the dimensions, stronger than memory, stronger than time. My hate is now the truest part of who I am.
— Claudia Gray, A Thousand Pieces of You
When it comes to Jews, you have a two-thousand-year memory, but when it comes to us Palestinians, you have a sixty-year amnesia.
— Suad Amiry, Golda Slept Here
Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist.
— Charles Simic, Jackstraws
The instant is gone, time has carried us into the realm of memory, it was like this, no, it was not, and everything becomes what we choose to invent.
— José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
I was a really good waitress. Waitressing takes a certain gusto. You need a good memory and an ability to connect with people fast. You have to learn how to treat the kitchen as well as you treat the customers. You have to figure out which crazy people to listen to and which crazy people to ignore. I loved waiting tables because when you cashed out at the end of the night your job was truly over. You wiped down your section and paid out your busboy and you knew your work was done.
— Amy Poehler
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory--part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction....What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.
— Susan Sontag
When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind? And what is it we expect from the sun-drenched past? There is no formula for re-entry, nothing we can do to enable reconstruction.
— Jane Urquhart, The Stone Carvers
Memory deludes me. I have just remembered something that I completely forgot after it happened. I remembered it again when I was about sixteen, and then I forgot it again. And this morning I remembered not the event itself but the previous recollection, which itself was more than forty years ago, as though an old moon were reflected in a windowpane from which it was reflected in a lake, from where memory draws not the reflection itself, which no longer exists, but only its whitened bones.
— Amos Oz
If you work hard enough at something that doesn’t matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.
— Octavia E. Butler
Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living. that’s the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred years or only a few weeks. It’s all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers.
— Sara Sheridan, British Bulldog
This country awakens so many memories, though each seems like some restless sparrow I know will flee any moment into the breeze.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant
For me, time does not seem to pass; rather, it surrounds me. Thus I do not feel removed from memories, nor do they lose their intensity. I have keen recollections not because I have a good memory—I simply retrieve them from the ether. When memories have no velocity, they are very much at hand.
— Peter Ruperte Lighte
To remember nothing," they would say. "What more could one possibly ask of eternity?
— Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting
But the remembering is imperfect; the instructions for which neurons need to be gathered and how exactly they need to fire are weak and degraded, leading to a representation that is only a dim and often inaccurate copy of the real experience. Memory is fiction. It may present itself to us as fact, but it is highly susceptible to distortion. Memory is not just replaying, but a rewriting.
— Daniel J. Levitin
This is the story I am working on. But it isn't complete as I don't have the right way to begin. I sit on the crosshouse floor and look at the objects. I see different ways they could be put together and the way the story changes over time. The objects fall into their groupings and they talk to each other in different fashions depending on where they're put and at first it makes me panic. I put the memories together again and again in their different patterns and try to understand which is the correct way. Then at last I see that there isn't one. I see that if I am lucky and do it right, the story will not ever come together in one final meaning. Because there is not yet any end.
— Anna Smaill
Didn’t young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?
— Sara Sheridan, British Bulldog
It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.
— Sara Sheridan, British Bulldog
We don't forget...Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, smells of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us of who we are.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
God always provides a pleasant memory to help ease the pain of a bad experience.
— Peggy Toney Horton
Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course.
— Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert
The evening's light, silvery, casts its dull brightness onto the trees--trees gelid in this blue light of winter. But whiteness dominates with the pines and evergreens steeped in vibrant grades of silver. I hear notes in the mist, like silvery chattering, coins in a pocket, the jangle of keys. Pg 217
— S.K. Kalsi, The Stove-Junker
And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should not probably forget all about them.
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Maybe to have a memory you need time for reflection, however brief, just to let the memory find a place to settle.
— Alex Garland
His memory is perfectly clearand serves no good, no purposeat all. He has seen things before(the fly in the bottle,the indeterminate will).Santa Muerte, Saint Death,we pray to you to swallow our breath.
— Michael  Palmer, Thread
Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.
— Günter Grass, Peeling the Onion
... so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
The smooth, flat rocks were exactly the same, the sea pounded down on them in the same way, and also the landscape under the water, with its small valleys and bays and steep chasms and slopes, strewn with starfish and sea urchins, crabs and fish, was the same. You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyrolia bindings and Koflach boots. The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq soccer boots was just a pair of soccer boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn’t, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.
— Karl Ove Knausgård
But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shews us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air;...
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise?
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
Memory's got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.
— Ian McEwan
Aygi Cycle (4)Coarse hawthornbeloved uncle'smemory entwinedamong itsgnarled andarmored limbscopy ofLolita byhis deathbed
— Michael  Palmer, Thread
Nod house turned into shouthouse. In the shout house memorysaid shut up. It said silence,misery said amen, the mule'sheadmeant my stubborn lungs. . .I stoodimagining I fell back dreaming,stuck tongue stuck in my jawbrokemy jaw
— Nathaniel Mackey, Nod House
His memory is perfectly clearand serves not good, no purposeat all. He has seen things before(the fly in the bottle,the indeterminate will).Santa Muerte, Saint Death,we pray to you to swallow our breath.
— Michael  Palmer, Thread
There was something in the back of my brain, tapping its fingers on the door to my memory.
— Tim O"Mara, Crooked Numbers
Medieval illustrations of the mind from the fourteenth century depict memories like snakes feeding into the imagination and, long before this, both Aristotle and Galen described memories not as archives of our lives, but as tools for the imagination.
— Claudia Hammond, Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception
Neurotic guilt scans the horizons of the past relentlessly seeking out the most deplorable, hideous, and culpable acts which are least consistent with one's self image. This process is similar to the infinite passion of intensified anxiety for seeking the worst conceivable possibilities in order to alert the whole organism to potential danger.
— Thomas C. Oden, Guilt Free
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
He thought of his remembrance of Jordan, thought of how it hurt to even look at Isabelle and Clary. Without memory, they were lost. And nobody wanted someone they loved to be lost.
— Cassandra Clare, Welcome to Shadowhunter Academy
No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors… This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.
— Erwin Schrödinger
He's not learning. He's not experiencing. He's remembering.He walks to the next screen, hungry to be himself again.
— James Dashner, The Maze Runner Files
What is this 'I'? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by 'I' is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones. Less and less important will become the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one. 'The youth that was I', you may come to speak of him in the third person, indeed the protagonist of the novel you are reading is probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you. Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death. And even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.
— Erwin Schrödinger
With a little heartache; Gone with the time, Are certain memories, Intricately designed.To call & narrate A story of blissful sunshine.
— Somya Kedia
It’s what we’re all trying to do, right? Remember a time that was better. Re-create a moment of that memory as we let the crisp Coke bubble down our throats. Riding bikes on a summer day. Sitting on the curb and watching the streetlights come on. Playing in the sprinklers with a group of neighbor kids. We’re all trying to salvage a time when we dreamed beyond our reality and thought monsters were under our beds instead of peppering our family trees. We’re trying to harness those fleeting moments that turned our ordinary lives into something extraordinary. In the sepia haze of those memories, we are beautiful.
— Liza Palmer, Nowhere But Home