Quotes About Memory

It is hard to forget that which it is worse than useless to remember.

The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed.

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners?

but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves?

Most people do not read; those who read do not understand; those who understand forget.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Comfort me by a solemn Assurance, that when the little Parlour in which I sit at this Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with Honour, by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know nor see.

It is almost possible to sum up the whole process of thinking as the occurrence of suggestions for the solution of difficulties and the testing out of those suggestions. The suggestions or suppositions are tested by observation,memory, experiment.

Her memory's your love. You want no other.

One never said the things one wanted — one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn't, simply from a sense that one had to say something.

Wasn't history full of the destruction of precious things?

If I could stay — For me you'll always be here, she softly interrupted.

I've thought of you perpetually, ever since I last saw you. I'm exactly the same. I love you just as much, and everything I said to you then is just as true.

But these fancies were not marked enough not not to be thrown off, and it is only in the light, or the gloom, I should rather say, of other and subsequent matters that they now come back to me.

But even while they pretend to be lost in their fairy-tale they're steeped in their vision of the dead restored to them.

It was nothing, but it was somehow everything—it was that something for each of them had happened.

Forbidden ground was the question of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in especial, might survive, in memory, of the friends little children had lost.

You see, people forget you

impression of having seen me before.  It was not till afterwards that I thought this rather characteristically dull of him.  I drew him far away—I was

To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumor kept her imagination awake.

What could be more dreary than final interviews? One never said the things one wanted — one remembered them all an hour afterwards.

The whole past is between them.

He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of three or four years before, a Chad who had, after all, simply—for that was the only way to see it—been too vulgar for his privilege. Surely it was a privilege to have been young and happy just there. Well, the best thing Strether knew of him was that he had had such a dream.

The past came back to her in one of those rushing waves of emotion by which persons of sensibility are visited at odd hours.