c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I can't remember what I really felt. Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions.
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
Marina wouldn't want to be remembered because she dead. She would want to be remembered because she's good.
— Anne Fadiman, The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories
Life is like a clock, it goes round and round, until the battery dies. Unlike clocks when humans die, they are either dead for good or they are still alive in the minds of others. To live on after death one must make a name for himself, if one fails to make a name for himself, then he will die alone, and forgotten.
— Satuin Segi
Touching him is familiar and unfamiliar. We have been here before. Also we have never been here before.
— E. Lockhart, We Were Liars
A chair can be more valuable in memories than, say, a precious gem. A gem could have no stories to share; no lives altered or changed in the slightest. It could remain buried beneath the earth for all we know and never have any memory to embody. A chair could transcend time and generations; from the people who sat in it and onlookers. It's all about considering what stories could be told if they had voices of their own.
— Lauren Lola, An Absolute Mind
You remember it your way and I'll remember it mine.
— Jon Chopan, Pulled from the River
I began to curse the past for passing.
— Mara Rostov, Eroica
But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.
— Ali Smith, Autumn
Now when the flowers are in full bloom,It is the ashes from the past that hidden loom.
— Selina A. Mahmood, Apophasis: A Bildungsroman Through Facebook
Nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.
— André Gide, The Immoralist
Memories are as infinite as the horizon.
— David Arnold
But the lost one is with you.Her tenderness strengthens you,Her gaiety uplifts you,Her honor purifies you.More than memory,The lost one is found.
— Gail Carson Levine, Ella Enchanted
I'd seen old Yardley Slickers- the makeup now just a waxy crumble- sell for almost one hundred dollars on the internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it- to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been, still existed inside of them. There were so many things that returned me. The tang of soy, the smoke in someone's hair, the grassy hills turning blond in June. An arrangement of oaks and boulders could, seen out of the corner of my eye, crack open something in my chest, palms going suddenly slick with adrenaline.
— Emma Cline, The Girls
Nothing about these times makes any sense. Nothing. Putting it to words only makes it sound too simple.
— Ralph  Webster, A Smile in One Eye: a Tear in the Other
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890: “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out,” he wrote. “But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.” Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human,” said Ed.
— Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
She dug into one of the boxes, finding clay angels she’d made in art class when she was seven years old. She found plastic swans on strings and red crystal cardinals. She found a blue-and-white rocking horse covered in glitter. She found a porcelain Santa Claus. She found that she couldn’t figure out where the hell time had gone.
— Rebecca McNutt, Mandy and Alecto: The Collected Smog City Book Series
If we could imagine, while we live them, to what mundane moments nostalgia manages to stick itself...
— Luigina Sgarro
There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already.
— Ian McEwan, Nutshell
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient - at others, so bewildered and so weak - and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! - We are to be sure a miracle every way - but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.
— Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
I shall never forget you. I have never forgotten anyone whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to be so.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
I know what success means to me – it is when you look back at your life and the memories make you smile. That’s what success is to me
— Debalina Haldar, Wrinkles in Memory
Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime's minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component?
— Philip Roth, Indignation
Imagine being just strong enough to remember what life was like, feeling things, your heartbeat, the world around you. And imagine you couldn’t have it anymore, couldn’t even properly remember it, but there was just enough that some deep part of you knew what you were missing. Wouldn’t you do anything to get it back, if it was right there for the taking? Wouldn’t you be willing to kill for it?
— Apollo Blake, Storm of Masks
Memory is a wilful dog. It won't be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are.
— Elliot Perlman, The Street Sweeper
Though Isobel could recall only a few specifics regrading the appearance of Poe's wife-a handful of vague characteristics picked up during her study with Varen, retained from the one or two glimpses she'd had for her portraits- Scrimshaw, it seemed, had forgotten nothing.
— Kelly Creagh, Oblivion
... Without memory how will you ever find your way back to where you came from?
— Michael Ende, The Neverending Story
Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain.
— Don DeLillo, The Names
There is a continuity in our lives—a strain of music that flows through it all, unaltered by death or pain. It is true that in the face of pain and death, we are very small. But in the face of life and memory and love, even death is very small.
— Yael Shahar, A Damaged Mirror: A story of memory and redemption
That's the life, she said to me, as we watched a puppy chase its own tail. That's what I want to be next.I had laughed. you would wind up as a cat, I told her. They don't need anyone else.I need you, she replied.Well, I said. Maybe I'll come back as catnip.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived. It is looked at, unrelated things congregate, and geographic proximity gives them meaning. If events follow each other, they are believed to be a story. But in a dictionary, time doesn't exist: ABC is neither more nor less chronological than BCA. To portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.
— Édouard Levé, Suicide
I dream for an absentee and oft maligned device—the accident-maker, the soul-taker, my camera; its factory guaranteedthird eye, without which I am duly dimand memory denied. No picturesfor my contrived Arbus to declare, excepting some stitch of Sextonmanages these sentences of despair.
— Kristen Henderson
I go, but I always remember you.
— Isabel Allende, The Japanese Lover
If you knew you were going to lose your memorybut you could choose five things you’d never forget, what would they be—a certain face, a taste, a scent,a touch; how deepin this, the middle of your life?
— Kristen Henderson
You can map out a whole city according to the weight of memory, like pins on the homicide board tracking the killer's movements. But the connections get thicker and denser and more complicated all the time.
— Lauren Beukes, Moxyland
Lacking natural equilibrium, I used writing as an illustrative means to center myself in a world filled with haziness and uncertainty. My self-drafted obituary will not bemoan death but shall celebrate life by giving heartfelt thanks for all the people that brightened actuality with their kindness, friendship, noble acts of charity, and expressions of universal goodwill. It was a privilege to exist in this wrinkle of time with many people devoted to burnishing the sharpen edges of life. The heavens blessed me with many years to discover why it is beautiful to live and die in a world where the hills and wind, the rivers and seas, stars and moon, and revealing sunlight shall persevere.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The whole of eternity is present now. We apprehend eternity through our senses and mental imagination. We can never recapture lost time. Memory allows us to taste the scintillating experience of living by recollecting our past in a series of sequential personal events and an orderly arrangement of a linked series of cultural happenings. Writing our personal story calls for us to remember the sensation of what it entails to live tactilely before losing lucidity of the mind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Somehow your heart still knows me.
— T.K. Naliaka, Iron Mixed with Sand Salt without Memory
I have always thought of memories as fragments, like colored glass shards in a kaleidoscope. It is the source of great beauty in our lives, yet the cause of such heartache. It remains the bridge between our past and present - it gives weight and dimension to our very existence.
— Lang Leav, Memories
Traces of human life vanish very quickly: Glafira Petrovna's estate had not yet gone wild, but it seemed already to have sunk into that quiet repose which possesses everything on earth wherever there is no restless human infection to affect it.
— Ivan Turgenev, Home of the Gentry
memory is a shallow grave
— Jenny Toune
To remember is to rewrite. To photograph is to replace. The only reliable memories, I suppose, are the ones that have been forgotten. They are the dark rooms of the mind. Unopened, untouched, and uncorrupted.
— Abby Geni, The Lightkeepers
My best memory of school was probably leaving school. Because I hated that fucking place.
— Troye Sivan
One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy— at the time, not afterwards. Most people don’t realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happiness. Their enjoyment takes the form of reminiscence, and it is always tinged with regret that they had not known at the time how happy they were. But I knew, and my memory (of bad times too) was detailed and intense.
— Paul Theroux, My Secret History
(Blurb) Throughout Human Acts the ghost memory of the boy Dong-Ho wanders, refusing to disappear, and so in turn other characters refuse to stop asking 'Why?' Why does power exert itself with brutality? Why does the state silence the enquiries of the bereaved?Why does remembrance pose such a threat to the powerful?
— Han Kang, Human Acts
the currency of the future will be memory
— Dean Cavanagh
Don't go back over the past. Let it depart, never to return.
— Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk
Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror....
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here, another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember a memory often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering.
— Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall
When I look at myself in the mirror, I wonder where everything has gone. Even the things I used to remember with so much clarity now seem dimmer. What happens to memory when it vanishes? What happens to events when everyone who remembers them ceases to remember?
— Dean Francis Alfar, Salamanca
The uncertainty of the future made them turn their hearts toward the past. They saw themselves in the lost paradise of the deluge, splashing in the puddles in the courtyard, killing lizards to hang on Úrsula, pretending that they were going to bury her alive, and those memories revealed to them the truth that they had been happy together ever since they had had memory.
— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
The two things clearest in my mind were, that a remoteness had come upon the old Blunderstone life—which seemed to lie in the haze of an immeasurable distance; and that a curtain had for ever fallen on my life at Murdstone and Grinby's. No one has ever raised that curtain since. I have lifted it for a moment, even in this narrative, with a reluctant hand, and dropped it gladly. The remembrance of that life is fraught with so much pain to me, with so much mental suffering and want of hope, that I have never had the courage even to examine how long I was doomed to lead it. Whether it lasted for a year, or more, or less, I do not know. I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
He could swear he did not look back, could not—by any optical chance, or in any prism—have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture—which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never—consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
I imagine the feelings of two people meeting after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't, have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect.
— Milan Kundera, Ignorance
My school-days! The silent gliding on of my existence—the unseen, unfelt progress of my life—from childhood up to youth! Let me think, as I look back upon that flowing water, now a dry channel overgrown with leaves, whether there are any marks along its course, by which I can remember how it ran.
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
At such times one sees everything and remembers it all. I know from personal experience. I wish I did not.
— Stephen King, Revival
You should just keep your mouth shout! It gets very tedious having you make a snarky comment about everything that someone says in this group.
— Jojo Moyes, After You
Remembering, in Spanish, means to pass something through the heart again, and now all the years are going through his heart again as he tries to turn away from the ocean. But he hears it and he knows it is out there. Some sleepless nights he goes out. But this night in his sleep he says, "Oh, look at all those beautiful life rafts.
— Linda Hogan, People of the Whale
The appreciation of birds, indeed the appreciation of all the phenomena of spring, cannot be dissociated from the accumulations of memory. The appearance of a familiar bird immediately awakens a train of forgotten associations, and this makes each spring transcend its predecessor. The interest accumulates and is compounded. The first yellow-throated warbler next year will be the more meaningful to me as it brings back that moment in the woods opposite Dyke. For one remembers clearly enough the fact of such a moment, but only an evocative sight or sound or smell can bring back the full emotion. The person who sees the bird for the first time cannot know what moves me.
— Louis J Halle
Maybe that's who you are, what you remember.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
And all of these involved remembering that someone existed whom you hadn’t thought of in a while, an ability that had atrophied in the minds of people who could not remember a time without social networking, just as people near the end of the twentieth century had lost the ability to remember the long and semi-random strings of digits that made up phone numbers once cellphones began to do that for them.
— Dexter Palmer, Version Control
We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.
— Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
Writing about memories is an elusive process. It often begins with a good intention: to convey the truth. What happens in reality is that we only write down what passes through the censors' eyes. The censors here are the ambient time and space, social and political conditions, and the psychological changers the writer herself. What one writes now is certainly not what actually happened. It is but a vague indicator of what might have happened, a mixture of illusive and contracted images, a dream, or an act conditioned by either a denial or a desire to see past events shaped by what is yearned for in the present. p. 153
— Haifa Zangana, Dreaming of Baghdad
We have to watch Nana's life slipping away from her like a forgotten word. I thought I understood what's happening to her, but this isn't like being robbed a penny at a time. Memories aren't currency to spend; they're us. Age isn't stealing from my grandmother; it's slowly unwinding her.
— Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants
...he told me all the things he liked to THINK he thought in the misty past.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography
Begin with “I remember.” Write lots of small memories. If you fall into one large memory, write that. Just keep going. Don’t be concerned if the memory happened five seconds ago or five years ago.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies.
— Dexter Palmer
He had managed to lock away everything he didn't want to remember... and the memories returned as well.
— Daniel Levine
Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed.
— Cormac McCarthy
Memories are important, like the bones of the mind. We build ourselves upon them, flesh and blood moulded around the pictures of what is past.
— Paul Kearney
I may appear to suffer from some sort of compulsive repetition syndrome, but these rituals are important to me. I have many places where I sit and think, “I have been here before, I am here now, and I will be here again.” Sometimes, lost in reverie, I remember myself approaching across the same green, or down the same footpath, in 1962 or 1983, or many other times. Sometimes Chaz comes along on my rituals, but just as often I go alone. Sometimes Chaz will say she’s going shopping, or visiting a friend, or just staying in the room and reading in bed. “Why don’t you go and touch your bases?” she’ll ask me. I know she sympathizes. These secret visits are a way for me to measure the wheel of the years and my passage through life. Sometimes on this voyage through life we need to sit on the deck and regard the waves.
— Roger Ebert, Life Itself
Some memories made in time will last ages tossed aside.
— Adhish Mazumder
A mind wanders, thoughts flee and memories fade. But tattoos, tattoos are forever. And if it is true to say that we carry ourselves with when we travel - then the body may very well be a beautiful canvas for the timeless lessons we learn and will learn when we travel.
— lauren klarfeld
If you want big improvements, she said, chew gum. Gum? Sure enough, chewing gum has been shown to improve a person's immediate recall of learned words by some 24 percent. Long-term recall improves by a larger 36 percent. To get the benefit, you actually have to chew gum as you are studying; for some reason you can't merely move your jaw up and down. I also discovered that drinking sage tea increases one's recall of words modestly, as does the odor of rosemary. Something as mundane as coffee provides a benefit, too. Drinking two cups of coffee increases neuronal activity in the frontal lobe, where working memory is controlled, and in the anterior cingulum, where attention is controlled.
— Michael Erard, Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
Always resist the temptation to forget the painful parts of your past.
— Runescape
You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.Sara looked directly into his eyesI nothing else, you need to remember that. you can't erase history, or change it. it would be like destroying yourself.
— Haruki Murakami
It's much easier to hate a memory. I would know.
— Renee Ahdieh, The Rose & the Dagger
He trailed through hallways, ducking under arms no longer there, excusing himself as he pressed through conversations long since ended.
— Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King
There are events in one's life which, no matter how remote, never fade from memory
— Jim Corbett, The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag
If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our own transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we've created is a way of fending off mortality. It allows ideas to be efficiently passed across time and space, and for one idea to build on another to a degree not possible when a thought has to be passed from brain to brain in order to be sustained. The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory...But as our culture has transformed from one that was fundamentally based on internal memories to one that is fundamentally based on memories stored outside the brain, what are the implications for ourselves and our society. What we've gained is indisputiable. But what have we traded away?
— Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
His mind was betraying him. Phantoms not heard from in a thousand years rousing slowly from their sleep.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
These memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow-- a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires-- but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. They are completely lost to us. They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are unattainable and we know it.And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us, we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in memory; but the man himself it is not.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Nostalgia... the blessing of a merciful memory.
— Steve Maraboli
That's truth, Harvey, not what's written on a piece of paper or in blood too small to see - but the memory of how it felt being together.
— Simon Van Booy, Father's Day
For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable “memory fragment”—often called a “trace” or an “engram”—or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new “trace” to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be “scribbles,” “holograms,” or “imprints”; they could live in “spirals,” “rooms,” or “storage units.” Personally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, I see Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars.
— Maggie Nelson, Bluets
Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.
— Lauren Groff, Arcadia
Most people are not really scared of death. They are merely terrified of being taken to a mortuary and/or being buried or cremated and/or being forgotten.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Several died the day the bomb was dropped. Some lived six months after the explosion but died anyway. They were all lost. It was so long ago, young man. To you it is a history story. To me it is my life.
— Joseph G. Peterson, Wanted: Elevator Man
The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.
— Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
Old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Memory, of course, is unreliable, often evil, but it is the source of our identity."--Tennessee Williams
— James Grissom
Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?
— Aminatta Forna
A forest fire was making its way along the tinderbox ridges above them, flaring and shimmering against the overcast like the northern lights. Cold as it was he stood there a long time. The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember.
— Cormac McCarthy
It is dangerous to use our own ability to access non-traumatic memories as a standard against which we judge a trauma victim’s response.
— David Yeung
There are certain songs, and books, and films that are like points of high ground in the memory. Like they are even larger than your own experiences. They never go away.
— Graham Joyce, The Silent Land
...the mind can also be kind and does blot out those episodes of our existence that we can't erase in our consciousness.
— F. Sionil José
In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer.
— Adam Sisman
When time furtively slips like sand through the fingers and our memory becomes tired and lazy, we recognize we are at war. We are at war with forgetfulness. ("The past was her best friend" )
— Erik Pevernagie
We are what we remember. If we lose our memory, we lose our identity and our identity is the accumulation of our experiences. When we walk down the memory lane, it can be unconsciously, willingly, selectively, impetuously or sometimes grudgingly. By following our stream of consciousness we look for lost time and things past. Some reminiscences become anchor points that can take another scope with the wisdom of hindsight. ("Walking down the memory lane" )
— Erik Pevernagie
Make someone feel something and you will never be forgotten.
— Charlotte Eriksson
Memories come to mind like excavated statuesthat have misplaced their heads.
— Wisława Szymborska, View With a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems
She saw how the mind makes forever, in order to store the things it had already lost.
— Richard Powers
Memory is sweet.Even when it's painful, memory is sweet.
— Li-Young Lee
The wooden devil got a good laugh out of the ones who passed by, though. They were so funny she couldn't even feel sorry for them. They tried so hard to keep track of time. Whenever they were together they couldn't let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that they were either forgotten or misremembered.
— Helen Oyeyemi, What is Not Yours is Not Yours
O, never from the memory of my heartYour dear, paternal image shall depart,Who while on earth, ere yet by death surprised,Taught me how mortals are immortalized;How grateful am I for that patient careAll my life long my language shall declare.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I would prefer to believe that things possess the power of recall, of recollection. That things are memoirs of the existences that once were theirs, if only we knew how to read them.
— Norman Lock, The Boy in His Winter: An American Novel
I roll over on my back and clutch the book against my chest; then I chuck it on the carpet. It's too heavy to rest on me, too full of history. Not all of it is bad. Some of the memories make me smile. Some of them make me mad. But more dangerously, some of them make me wonder what my life would be like as a girlfriend, what it would be like to have a regular relationship, with all its ups and downs and awkward moments.I switch out my lamp and stare at the ceiling in the dark, taking a series of shaky breaths. I know that it’s better this way, being the one in control. The one in control calls the shots, and the one in control sets the pace.Most important of all, the one in control doesn’t get hurt.
— Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, Firsts
...read 1984 when it came out in 1949, and found its account of the ‘memory hole’ peculiarly evocative and frightening, for it accorded with my own doubts about my memory. I think that reading this led to an increase in my own journal keeping, and photographing, and an increased need to look at testimonies of the past
— Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten
As long as Simon didn’t think about the past, the past couldn’t hurt him. But, increasingly, he couldn’t help himself.There was too much pleasure in the pain.
— Cassandra Clare, The Evil We Love
There's a thine line between being a hero and being a memory.
— Optimus Prime
The fountain of youth resides in our memory. You will never outlive your shadow.
— Lorin Morgan-Richards
Memory is that element in our consciousness that connects the past with the present. If we had no memory, there would be only one moment of our life, the moment we call now, and we would never consciously recognize more than this single moment.
— Gustaf Stromberg
The worms do not take heed of caste and rank when they feast on our ashes," the Raja said. "Your subjects will not remember you. They will not remember the shade of your eyes, the colors you favored, or the beauty of your wives. They will only remember your impression upon their hearts and whether you filled them with glee or grief. That is your immortality.
— Roshani Chokshi, The Star-Touched Queen
The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciouness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep. Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event. Thus, even normally safe environments may come to feel dangerous, for the survivor can never be assured that she will not encounter some reminder of the trauma.
— Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
Two years of oblivion have reduced me, if not to emptiness, than to something that sits closely beside it. It laid waste all that I was inside, and severed what connection existed between my memory and personality through two years of “living” like a shell, on the boundary of emptiness. And though there was precious little drama here compared to actual societal rejection, it drives me to worry all the same. All my memories are just reflections on the water, and I don’t know whether I’m the reflection or the real thing.
— Kinoko Nasu, 空の境界 上
Time's arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.
— Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girlsare always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Melancholy of Mechagirl
the invisible storehouse in nothingness, called memory.
— Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country
Her mother had smelled of cold and scales, her father of stone dust and dog. She imagined her husband's mother, whom she had never met, had a whiff of rotting apples, though her stationary had stunk of baby powder and rose perfume. Sally was starch, cedar, her dead grandmother sandalwood, her uncle, swiss cheese. People told her she smelled like garlic, like chalk, like nothing at all. Lotto, clean as camphor at his neck and belly, like electrified pennies at the armpit, like chlorine at the groin. She swallowed. Such things, details noticed only on the edges of thought would not return. 'Land,' Mathilde said, 'odd name for a guy like you.''Short for Roland,' the boy said.Where the August sun had been steaming over the river, a green cloud was forming. It was still terrifically hot, but the birds had stopped singing. A feral cat scooted up the road on swift paws. It would rain soon.'Alright Roland,' Mathilde said, suppressing as sigh, 'sing your song.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
How, Dearest, wilt thou have me for most use?A hope, to sing by gladly? or a fineSad memory, with thy songs to interfuse?A shade, in which to sing—of palm or pine?A grave, on which to rest from singing? Choose.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
Sometimes the memory of someone is better than the reality of them.
— Steve Maraboli
I don't know what it is about the food your mother makes for you, especially when it's something that anyone can make - pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad - but it carries a certain taste of memory.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
Rosie loved Tom. Rosie had always loved Tom and, although she was unable to measure "always" in terms of years and months, this made perfect sense to her. Their love was not constrained by the mortal bonds of time; it was eternal, ageless and ancient beyond all recollection and record.
— Tanya Bullock
In this chapter I restrict myself to exploring the nature of the amnesia which is reported between personality states in most people who are diagnosed with DID. Note that this is not an explicit diagnostic criterion, although such amnesia features strongly in the public view of DID, particularly in the form of the fugue-like conditions depicted in ﬁlms of the condition, such as The Three Faces of Eve (1957). Typically, when one personality state, or ‘alter’, takes over from another, they have no idea what happened just before. They report having lost time, and often will have no idea where they are or how they got there. However, this is not a universal feature of DID. It happens that with certain individuals with DID, one personality state can retrieve what happened when another was in control. In other cases we have what is described as ‘co-consciousness’ where one personality state can apparently monitor what is happening when another personality state is in control and, in certain circumstances, can take over the conversation.
— John Morton, Trauma, Dissociation and Multiplicity: Working on Identity and Selves
Old memories are always there. Like they happened yesterday.
— TinaJ. Richardson
Designer of information superhighways need to take the occasional stroll down memory lane.
— Geoffrey Bowker
We don't forget... we remember... but later it becomes so faded and light in our memory that it no longer holds power to influence us anyway...
— shivangi lavaniya
No. I remember. So long as I don't think about it too much, my hands and feet take over; some memory locked into muscle that my brain has nothing to do with.I know how to drive. And I'm better at it than he is.
— Teri Terry, Slated
And of all the rooms in my childhood,God was the largestand most empty.
— Li-Young Lee
What we have instead are false memories aroused later and more pertinent to this later perspective than to the original events. Sometimes in matters of great emotion, one representation, retaining all the original intensity, comes to replace another, which is then discarded and forgotten. The new representation is called a screen memory. A screen memory is a compromise between remembering something painful and defending yourself against that very remembering.
— Karen Joy Fowler
Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream. Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done. All the lost things that may one day call to me, the faces of my children who will one day call to me. Maybe we can't draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole.
— Patti Smith, M Train
What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.
— Edmund Wilson
To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget. A memorable sandwich, an unmemorable flight of stairs. A memorable bit of conversation surrounded by chatter that no one records.
— Sarah Manguso
Memory is all I have now
— James Patterson, First Love
It's late at night when the memory comes for me, like it always seems to when the relief of sleep seems ready to draw me under.
— Joaquin Lowe, Bullet Catcher
In the serenity and quiet of this lovely place, touch the depths of truth, feel the hem of Heaven. And when you leave, don't forget why you came...
— Oksana Rus
Every memory we have changes slightly each time we think about it. We add stuff we learn in other places, or we forget stuff that doesn't seem important anymore. Or you think you remember something, like from your childhood, but actually you've just seen so many pictures of it, and your parents have told you about it, so you think you remember it, but you don't. A memory is a process. Instead of a thing. Like a story we tell ourselves that changes from the standpoint we're looking at it.
— Katherine Howe, The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen
There was something brittle about her, and he feared she would snap apart at the slightest touch; she had thrown herself so fiercely into this, the erasing of memory, that it would destroy her.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
Portland was a dream both in the literal sense and the metaphorical sense, both tangible and not - a fleeting affair you want to hold on to but can't, so you try memorizing her every detail only to fail to do so in the consumption, in the savoring, in the absorbing of yourself into her. When she's gone, she comes to you in snippets, replaying in your mind like a fragmented picture show.
— Jackie Haze, Borderless
I'm sure that you didn't think I would notice,but we memorize the strangest things in a personwhen we're in love with them.
— Danabelle Gutierrez, & Until The Dreams Come
It was as if the body disdained memory... or refused the responsibility of it.
— Stephen King, Gerald's Game
Memory is a wilful dog. It won't be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule all of its own that you can never know. It can capture, corner you or liberate you. It can leave you howling and it can make you smile.
— Elliot Perlman
Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary
— Anthony Doerr, About Grace
People have two deaths: the first at the end of their lives, when they go away, and the second at the end of the memory of their lives, when all who remember them are gone. Then a person quits the world completely.
— Raghu Karnad
I had spent so much of life being afraid or living the memory of being afraid.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Forever
the flicker of a memoryis all we can cling tofor our cherished ghostsFrom "Cat Paws on a Windscreen
— J.S. Watts, Years Ago You Coloured Me
I should have been the King of Earth, or at least that's what my memory tells me...
— Brad McKinniss, Beast Machine
I don't need a speech. I have all I need to say right up here. He pointed at his head in confidence.
— Brad McKinniss, Beast Machine
No person can walk all alone because to walk all alone one must have no memories at all from the past!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Memories with laughter are the best ones to keep.
— Dan Groat, An Enigmatic Escape: A Trilogy
The things we remember are what we hold on to. And what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives.
— Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners
We are our memory,we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,that pile of broken mirrors.
— Jorge Luis Borges, In Praise of Darkness
Dementia isn’t the only place that memories are found to be flawed—people find out they can’t rely on their memories every day. People blindsided in relationships. People who find out their truth is a lie. People pulled from trauma. People awakened, as in Anna and Eve. I wondered: If you can’t use memories to steer your life, what can you use? I didn’t know. It was why I had to write this book.
— Sally Hepworth
Conscious access to memory is a unique trait of living things, but memory itself is not. It's encoded in the minute vibrations between elementary particles. Our entire universe is built of information given shape. Part of that is its history. Its memory.
— M.R. Graham, The Medium
The receding perspective of my past smothers my present. Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.
— Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
It was one of the few stories we told the same way.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
Travel is an evolving experience. It doesn't take place in photographs or your past... Instead it's tucked up there in your memory and when you need a bit of it, or a new perspective on something hidden within it, it will emerge into your conscious mind
— Dan Kieran
My students tag tables, walls, and chairs because their greatest fear is that no one will ever remember them. They do not believe they can give impassioned speeches, rally people in protest, paint masterpieces. They think they will die, small and forgotten, and it dictates their every action.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Juvenile Justice: A Reference Handbook, 2nd Edition: A Reference Handbook
Fame is like drifting clouds, transient and ephemeral. Memory is forever.
— Debasish Mridha
When you try to forget, you will never be able to do it. It will only create a stronger memory. You can’t erase an event or memory from your memory box or hippocampus. The memory will only get stronger.
— Debasish Mridha
If you try to forget it, nothing can erase a memory.
— Debasish Mridha
Levade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.
— Sebastian Faulks
Novelty has a way of intensifying memory. The less often you do something, the deeper the memory burrows in.
— Meghan Daum
It would be one hell of an addition to someone's scrapbook. (Dark City Lights)
— Bill Bernico
The print was an old one made from a negative taken in the 1960’s of her parents in Sydney Mines, dancing with thrilled, excited expressions on their faces, in front of a classic car that had been a wedding gift at the time. Her mother’s hair, red back then, was held back by a blue handkerchief, and she was dressed in a billowing skirt and white blouse. Her father’s denim jeans and faded t-shirt were streaked with coal dust as he held her hands and spun her around in the front yard of their old clapboard house, yellow grass under their feet and a cobalt-blue sky with white clouds drifting above. Mandy could almost feel the late summer breeze as she gazed deeply into the print, watching the flamboyant colors come to life. She hung it up to dry on two wooden clothespins hanging from a string above her.
— Rebecca McNutt, Super 8: The Sequel to Smog City
Amber starts off as sap from a tree," Joseph said in the dark. "And sometimes insects get caught in it, and over millions of years the amber turns into a gemstone, but it traps the insect inside.""Oh.""A photograph is sort of like that, don't you think?
— Brian Selznick
But that alteration, catastrophic though it was, had long been absorbed into the water table; the unspeakable day still flooded the downs. He wasn't the type to convince himself that facts were not facts, but he needed to stop living intolerable spans again. Surely it was enough to have lived them once.
— H.S. Cross
That’s why you have to go and guilt him for all the trouble. It can’t be your fault that you lost your memory if he wasn’t smart enough to tell you about the wine.
— Denny B. Reese, The Broken Court
What I had experienced at the age of twenty was not yet a memory. And memory meant not that what-had-been recurring, but that what-had-been situated itself by recurring. If I remembered, I knew that an experience was thus and so, exactly thus; in being remembered, it first became known to me, nameable, voiced, speakable; accordingly I look on memory as more than haphazard thinking back - as work; the work of memory situates experience in a sequence that keeps it alive, a story which can open out into free storytelling, greater life, invention.
— Peter Handke, Repetition
Love is Short, Remembering is long
— Jack Waddell
Do you think the memory of someone should dictate how we live going forward?' he asks, threading and unthreading his fingers together.'It depends,' I say. 'I think you can probably honor someone's memory, but you can't live for them, because that means living in the past.
— Alexandra Bracken, Through the Dark
Humans do not proceed in an orderly fashion from one scene to the next. Memory lies underneath happenstance
—  hope and dread sprawl on top. Our days and nights are their endless orgies.
Memory is the enemy of wonder
— Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World