Memory Quotes
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A happy memory is perhaps on this earth truer than happiness itself.
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The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams.
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You see heaven isn't some place that we go to when we die. It's that split second in life where you actually feel alive, and until the end of time, we chase the memory of that, hoping the future holds something better than the past.
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Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories...The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.
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Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.
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I might refer at once, if necessary, to a hundred well authenticated instances. One of very remarkable character, and of which the circumstances may be fresh in the memory of some of my readers, occurred, not very long ago, in the neighboring city of Baltimore, where it occasioned a painful, intense, and widely extended excitement.
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The senses at first let in particular Ideas, and furnish the yet empty Cabinet: And the Mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the Memory, and Names got to them.
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Sometimes a perfect memory can be ruined if put to words.
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There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.
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Life outraces memory.
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What would it do to your psyche if this were your sky? What would it do to the racial awareness of your species if this were their memory of their dirt-bound cradle, before they stepped out into the great emptiness beyond?
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Old folks live on memory, young folk live on hope.
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The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstition of the Christian religion.
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And I try to remember if this happened before, because this is a memory I would want to keep. But there is no echo of it in my mind.
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All along I have known they are confident players, but they don't do it in a boastful way. Tommie is not intimidated by anybody. I have this vivid memory of how we were about to tip it off at North Carolina, and he looked like he had been there 25 times before. Kevin is the same way. How many big shots has he made in every setting?
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I don't think there is such a thing as pure imagination. I think it's a combination of memory and invention.
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It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
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History repeats itself over and over again, but most of us have short memories.
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You never know when you're making a memory.
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Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of the crowd.
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Truth comes home to the mind so naturally, that when we learn it for the first time, it seems as though we did no more than recall it to our memory.
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The man who lies asleep will never waken fame, and his desire and all his life drift past him like a dream, and the traces of his memory fade from time like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.
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You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly not to lose them to time. To oblivion. But there's always the danger of the opposite happening. Losing the memory of the experience itself to the memory of writing about it.
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The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you. A fiction you’d forgotten was there. Frame, crossbeams, slats, braces, joins. Revealing the softer sapwood, which is marked by candle burns. ...Jonathan holding both of my hands under the table, one of the first times we’d really touched. You must think I’m a lunatic. No, I think it’s a beautiful story. About family and art and memory and meaning, how it’s made and unmade.
