Quotes About Memory

In the end, his mother's memory could not be shamed by a gift from God. Don't worry about me, she would say, and never worry what others may think. I worried too much about what others thought—I can tell you it's a tragic waste of time and energy and pokes God in the eye.

Memory is your museum, your cabinet of curiosities, your 'Wunderkammer.' It will never be full; there is always room for something new and strange and marvelous. It will never need dusting. It will last as long as you do. You can't let the public in to walk around it, but you can take out the exhibits and share them, share what you know. You will never be able to stop collecting.

The rose: though its petals are easily bruised, it blooms with exuberance. What power the rose possesses; the merest hint of a blossom conjures the deepest memory. At dawn, roses must be picked quickly, for they lose half their essence—the perfumer's treasure—by the high sun of noon. —DB

Perfume is my memory, the chronicle of my life. —DB

I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl (AS: I don't share that part of her feelings fully). I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.

Y]ou cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small clear image of the past.

And it will matter little, in after days, Whether this twig, or that, kindled the blaze.

Mrs. Miniver put the last sheet back on top of the others and clipped them all together again. No, she could not possibly throw them away: they contained too much of her life. Besides, however clear one's memories seemed to be, it did one no harm to polish them up from time to time. One is what one remembers: no more, no less.

Perhaps an eternal law of art is that, for everything discovered, something of value is forgotten.

De eeuwigheid is het ogenblik waarvan je zegt, dat zal ik nooit vergeten.

In de oorlog had ik daar wankel op de hoge hakken gelopen, met een jurk aan en een hoofddoek om. Om mijn broer te bewijzen dat ook ik geschikt was om illegaal werk te doen. Maar voor de garage kwam ik een jongen tegen die ik in jaren niet gezien had en die zei: 'Dag Jan!' Ik ging terug, trok de kleren van mijn zuster uit en bemoeide me verder niet meer met de oorlog.

Are you sure you weren't adopted?" "Mom would like to think so, but it was a natural birth, so her memory's real clear.

I mean, not when he was actually dead but from before, you know, when he wasn't dead?" "I get it.

Remember that incident in Egypt with the #No. 2 pencil?" "Don't be ridiculous," I snapped. "That was a Pentel, not a #No. 2.

Just as there can be a hole in these narratives, a memoir can be as much about what's forgotten as what's remembered.

I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.

We have seen (p. 71) that, out of the puppet or the May Queen, actually perceived year after year there arose a remembrance, a mental image, an imagined Tree Spirit, or "Summer," or Death, a thing never actually seen but conceived.

But there's time yet. The old women of the tribe have almost always been the wiser. If they keep their marbles long enough. Old men forget--or tend to reminisce, and reminisce falsely and sententiously as a rule. We are often very silly in our middle years but we tend to improve

Present us with a silver cup for something when you're a filthy rich lawyer, I dare say? Yes. You'll be a lawyer. Magnificent memory. Sense of logic, no imagination and no brains.

Memory changed for both Edward and Elisabeth. There were fewer people now to keep it alive.

We are all the product of our past and have to live with our memories and personality they cannot be erased.

Hunger that comes and goes turns time into memory.

When the body dies, where will they go, those migrant birds and prayer calls, as heat from sheets when taken from a dryer? With voices of the ones I loved, great loves and small loves, train wheels, crickets, clock-ticks, thunder – where will they, when in fragrant, tumbled heat they also leave?

Only remembering that a self in exile is still a self, as a bell unstruck for years is still a bell.