Quotes About Memory

Love, like energy, never dies. You lose people only in the moment. But time is a long road that circles back. At some point the missing turns into love and returns.

May you never forget what is worth remembering, nor ever remember what is best forgotten.

S)cents connects us to a past we can't always see, that seems lost but can so easily be conjured up and found.

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. —MARCEL PROUST, REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

Hosiah Lister, now dead, rec'd his freedom.

There are some who believe that the mind is a blank tablet, on which experience is writ until the page be full, and the cryptic world is known; but I see rather that my own life hath been one long forgetting, the erasure of what was drawn, a terrible redaction; til all that remains is blank white and comfortless. I know not what we have been; I know not what we are; but I know what we might be. And so I light out for the unknown regions.

We ain't anything more than a name and some likes and some distastes and a story we tell about ourselves.' 'And what others say about us.' 'If you want them stories heaped in, too, then you're welcome to them. And we're a body; and sometimes the stories and the name, they live on after the body.

Someday I'll give it to her. When everything is better. The natural history of her life, sketched out, because nothing means as much until it has vanished.

I could still smell the hospital in my nose. It wasn't anything around me. It was her. I stopped breathing, but the smell was still there. I held my breath.

because nothing means as much until it has vanished.

Violeta... ¿Violeta? Hay una historia que te voy a seguir contando. Voy a seguir contándotela. Tú eres esa historia. No quiero que olvides. Cuando despiertes, quiero que te recuerdes. Yo voy a acordarme. Existes mientras te recuerde. Mientras alguien te conozca. Yo te conozco tan bien que podría manejar un simulador. Ésta es la historia.

People want to forget. You can't blame them.

A few scenes have etched themselves into my memory," wrote Skrjabina, "probably until I die: a house demolished almost to its foundations, but one wall remained, still papered in the favorite cornflower design. There is even a picture hanging on it, as straight as ever. Above a heap of bricks, cement, and beams, a whole corner of an upper apartment of another house was preserved.

When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.

You became a memory everyone could share / and my work in this life is to chisel at memory.

Se hizo de noche. Las campanadas de la iglesia a los lejos la aclararon. Había olvidado su propia muerte.

De kunst is fraaier dan de werkelijkheid, maar beide leggen het af tegen de herinnering.

When I putt, my emotions collide like tectonic plates. It's left my memory circuits full of scars that won't heal.

Ao verme que primeiro roeu as frias carnes do meu cadáver dedico como saudosa lembrança estas memórias póstumas

O mais feroz dos animais domésticos é o relógio de parede. Conheço um que já devorou três gerações da minha família.

I could give you a number of examples to show how widespread has been this practice of mutual pilfering among the authors of our old literature.... by transferring something of theirs to his own immortal work he [Virgil] has ensured that the memory of these old writers—whom, as the tastes of today show, we are already beginning to deride as well as to neglect—should not wholly perish.

In A Man With a Pipe, my brother observed that although my father had been seen as intellectual and my mother more a creature of temperament, she had often been the more levelheaded of the two. In sum, we miss them as we love them, equally and always.

Already, "never again" was happening.

Those nostalgic for the region's good old days are not remembering; they're daydreaming.