Quotes About Memory

If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.

And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun/ And she forgot the blue above the trees,/ And she forgot the dells where waters run,/ And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;/ She had no knowledge when the day was done,/ And the new morn she saw not: but in peace/ Hung over her sweet basil evermore,/ And moisten'd it with tears unto the core.

Everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.

And must not, it may be asked, all this labour spent upon Keats' memory and remains, all this load of editing and re-editing and commentary and biography and scholiast-work laid upon a poet who declared that all poems ought to be understood without any comment, — must it not by this time have fairly smothered, or is it not at least in danger of smothering, Keats himself and his poetry?

Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds Along the pebbled shore of memory! Many old rotten-timber'd boats there be Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified To goodly vessels; many a sail of pride, And golden keel'd, is left unlaunch'd and dry.

I cannot say forget me—but I would mention that there are impossibilities in the world.

How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us … I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy.

Yet can I think of thee till thought is blind

Suddenly Mrs. Reilly remembered the horrible night that she and Mr. Reilly had gone to Prytania to see Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in 'Red Dust.' In the heat and confusion that had followed their return home, nice Mr. Reilly had tried one of his indirect approaches, and Ignatius was conceived. Poor Mr. Reilly. He had never gone to another movie as long as he lived.

I have sufficiently urged that all suggestions as to financial innovation be regarded with extreme skepticism. Such seeming innovation is merely some variant on an old design, new only in the brief and defective memory of the financial world.

F or a decade after the bursting of the debt bubble in 1837, business conditions were depressed in the United States. The number of banks available for financing speculative adventures declined. Then, after another 10 years, public memory faded again.

Contributing to and supporting this euphoria are two further factors little noted in our time or in past times. The first is the extreme brevity of the financial memory. ... The second ... is the specious association of money and intelligence.

The first is the extreme brevity of the financial memory. In consequence, financial disaster is quickly forgotten.

The crash in 1929, however, did have one therapeutic effect: it, somewhat exceptionally, lingered in the financial memory. For the next quarter of a century securities markets were generally orderly and dull. Although this mood lasted longer than usual, financial history was not at an end. The commitment to Schumpeter's mania was soon to be reasserted.

In the larger history of economics and finance, no year stands out as does 1929. It is, as I have elsewhere observed—like 1066, 1776, 1914, 1945, and now, perhaps, with the collapse of Communism, 1989—richly evocative in the public memory.

In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day i entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left.

The war was and is reality for me.

This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but that they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pigmies while you were looking the other way.

but people's memories are short for any sorrow that isn't theirs...

So long ago, was it in a dream, was it just a dream?

I once had a girl, or should I say she once had me.

Estimates of casualties, civilian and military, are notoriously inexact, but it is likely that some 27 million Soviet citizens died as a direct result of the war—roughly 90 times the number of Americans who died. Victory could hardly have been purchased at greater cost: the U.S.S.R. in 1945 was a shattered state, fortunate to have survived. The war, a contemporary observer recalled, was "both the most fearful and the proudest memory of the Russian people."2

For without some sense of the past the future can be only loneliness: amnesia is a solitary affliction.

Douglas, I've made a few small changes to acknowledge the passing of the years. Hope you're alive and well in some parallel universe - you're sadly missed in this one. John Lloyd, Oxfordshire, 2013