Quotes About Memory

It's always best if you can leave with a good memory.

I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing.

Selective amnesia is a good thing to have. So is good focus.

I like people who have the capacity to forget. I think that to forget is a good thing. Forgetting is good. But sometimes I cannot. For me, I cannot.

Anyone that knows me knows that I get over things quickly and usually forget about it as well. Sometimes a good thing, sometimes not so much.

The good things never stay in your head. Only the bad things live on.

I've been hit in the head a lot, but I don't think I have any problems, but I can't, for the life of me, remember a lot of my road stories and good times. When times are bad enough, that's all you can ever think about.

I basked in you; I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love. And death doesn't prevent me from loving you. Besides, in my opinion you aren't dead. (I know dead people, and you are not dead.)

All will be forgotten, everything you perceived, thought, dreamed, hoped, remembered . . . all the past all the crawling fucking coughing chestpounding nose-picking and deathward attempts to make real some desperate desire, like standing upright for a minute in the sun. The sun that will die.

In real life it's the living who haunt you. — Franz Wright, from section 1 of "Observations," Earlier Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

And her face remembered was intractable entirely; it wouldn't respond to any maneuver of his imagination, it offered no similes, as totally itself as the taste of garlic.

There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?

Much as we wish, not one of us can bring back yesterday or shape tomorrow. Only today is ours, and it will not be ours for long, and once it is gone it will never in all time be ours again. Thou only knowest what it holds in store for us, yet even we know something of what it will hold. The chance to speak the truth, to show mercy, to ease another's burden. The chance to resist evil, to remember all the good times and good people of our past, to be brave, to be strong, to be glad.

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

when we enter the gates of pain and use the healing power of memory, we will hear God speaking, and we can take comfort and rest our weary souls in his crazy, holy grace.

It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around...

When Jesus said, "Do this in remembrance of me" (1 Corinthians 11:24) he was not prescribing a periodic slug of nostalgia.

Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits.

Gali atsisveikindamas pabu?iuoti savo artimuosius ir bi?iulus, ir nutolti nuo j? per mylias, ta?iau vis tiek nešiesi juos savo širdyje, mintyse, pilve, nes ne tik tu gyveni pasaulyje, bet ir pasaulis gyvena tavyje.

The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek.

If a picture on the wall can remember, you remember that this is not the first time. If a picture on the wall can know things, you know that he has tried to leap out of that window before, and he is about to try again. He is trying to kill himself. He has tried nine times in the past fifty days. If a picture on the wall can regret, you regret this. It is a terrible waste for this man to keep trying to kill himself, since he does not at all want to die.

Fortunately, I have forgotten most of the things that have happened to me. Fortunately, the mind has a limited capacity for remembering. It would be horrible if I remembered the details of a hundred and eighty thousand years—the details of four thousand lifetimes that I have lived since the first great atomic war.

p5 - It is matter for wonder: the moment that is here and gone, that was nothing before and nothing after, returns like a specter to trouble the quiet of a later moment...the beast(animals)...forgets at once and sees every moment really die, sink into night and mist, extinguished forever. The beast lives unhistorically...