Memory Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Are you lonesome tonight,
Do you miss me tonight?
Are you sorry we drifted apart?
Does your memory stray to a brighter sunny day
When I kissed you and called you sweetheart?

Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?

Wallace Stevens

To leave a place, you'd best leave everything behind; all your possessions, including memory. Traveling's not as easy as it's made out to be.

Virginia Hamilton

First we try to preserve ourselves, until we see that we can't. Then we try to preserve our children, until we see we can't. Then we act to preserve our kin, and then our village or tribe, and when we see we can't preserve even them, then we act in order to preserve our memory. And if we can't do that, what is left?

Orson Scott Card

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

In Italy, almost at every step, history and poetry add to the graces of nature, sweeten the memory of the past, and seem to preserve it in eternal youth.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

For when by night the May wind blows
The lilac-blooms apart,
The memory of his first love
Is shaken on his heart.

Louise Imogen Guiney

During the thirty years I have spent abroad I have felt I was more privileged than my Western colleagues, whether writers or teachers of literature, for events both recent and long past took in my mind a sharply delineated, precise form. Western audiences confronted with poems or novels written in Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary, or with films produced there, possibly intuit a similarly sharpened consciousness, in a constant struggle against limitations imposed by censorship. Memory thus is our force, it protects us against a speech entwining upon itself like the ivy when it does not find a support on a tree or a wall.

Czesław Miłosz

I have no memory of climbing the stairs up to the roof. I don't even know how to get where I am, which is a problem since I'm going to have to get down, ideally in a way that doesn't involve dying.

Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting most of what I have learned or read. Since then, I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without. (...) I have stored little in my memory, but I can apply that little, and it is of use in many and varied emergencies. I keep it in order, but resist every attempt to increase its dead weight.

I will never, ever regret the things I've done. Because most days, all you have are places in your memory that you can go to.

A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.

Michel de Certeau

I've come to think that's what heaven is- a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on.

Christina Baker Kline

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

You can't kill history. You can't shoot it with a bullet and watch it recede into whatever lies outside of memory. History is tougher than that—if it's going to die, it has to die on its own

Intermittency — an impossible lesson for human beings to learn. How can one learn to live through the ebb-tides of one's existence? How can one learn to take the trough of the wave?... Perhaps this is the most important thing.... Simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of relationship is valid.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

One must have a good memory to keep the promises one has made.

What we leave behind in this life is the memory of who we were and what we did. An imprint, no more.

Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all.It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.

Time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.

William Blackstone

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

Vladimir Nabokov

A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets. But now you know there was a man named Jack Dawson, and that he saved me in every way that a person can be saved. I don't even have a picture of him. He exists now only in my memory.

James Cameron (director)

The brevity of our life, the dullness of our senses, the torpor of our indifference, the futility of our occupation, suffer us to know but little: and that little is soon shaken and then torn from the mind by that traitor to learning, that hostile and faithless stepmother to memory, oblivion.

John of Salisbury

But God is the God of our yesterdays, and He allows the memory of them to turn the past into a ministry of spiritual growth for our future. God reminds us of the past to protect us from a very shallow security in the present.

Oswald Chambers

The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.

Philip Gourevitch