Quotes About Memory

The living have to live with it. You don't. Theirs is the grief or the gladness of your death, theirs is the loss or gain of it. Theirs is the pain and the pleasure of memory.

When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which is inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort.

What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.

With what a deep devotedness of woe I wept thy absence - o'er and o'er again Thinking of thee, still thee, till thought grew pain, And memory, like a drop that, night and day, Falls cold and ceaseless, wore my heart away!

Oft in the stilly night,Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,Fond Memory brings the lightOf other days around me;The smiles, the tears,Of boyhood's years,The words of love then spoken;The eyes that shoneNow dimmed and gone,The cheerful hearts now broken.

Oh, breathe not his name! let it sleep in the shade,Where cold and unhonor'd his relics are laid.

And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls,Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.

To the soul, memory is more important than planning, art more compelling than reason, and love more fulfilling than understanding.

Every person of learning is finally his own teacher; the reason of which is, that principles, being of a distinct quality to circumstances, cannot be impressed upon the memory; their place of mental residence is the understanding, and they are never so lasting as when they begin by conception.

One may dream the same dream at intervals for years, and in each case it is an unconscious action, but if in his dream he recalls that he has had this dream before, and recognizes what is coming next, or remembers that it is different from what it was before, there has entered into his dream a factor of conscious thinking.

Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

He didn't have to remember, I remembered. I had bronzed the words. No, they were fragments of bullet, lodged in my heart. Whenever I moved a certain way they ached, so I learned a totally different way, a new walk, except it wasn't really a walk, it was more a permanent limp.

Every man feels that he must believe what he distinctly remembers, though he can give no other reason of his belief, but that he remembers the thing distinctly.

The stupid neither forgive or forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.

The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.

But all the photograph told Heidi was that the answers, if there were any, were lost in the wanting and needing and doing. Ghostly figures, caught in a brutal flash of light, and then gone.

Many Christians are like sieves. Put a sieve into the water, and it is full; but take it out of the water, and it all runs out. So, while they are hearing the sermon, they remember something of value. But, like the sieve, as soon as they have left the church, all is forgotten.

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

You can't go home again

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

O lost, And by the wind grieved, Ghost, Come back again.

Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.

All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.