Good, bad, happy or sad – memories will stay with you forever. But it is our responsibility to sort out which ones we will embrace, and which ones we won’t.
That’s why, I have made a really versatile article, that talks about various kinds of memories, and emotions that we connect with those memories.
Therefore, without further ado, enjoy reading my favorite online collection of memory quotes!
10 Best Memory Quotes Ever
1. “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” ― Mark Twain
2. “Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.” ― Guy de Maupassant
3. “Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.” ― Steven Wright
4. “Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.” ― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
5. “Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
6. “One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.” ― Rita Mae Brown
7. “We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss.” ― Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
8. “People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn’t.” ― Christopher Paolini, Eragon
9. “But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
10. “A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.” ― Mark Twain
20 Famous Memory Quotes
1. “Forbidden to remember, terrified to forget; it was a hard line to walk.” ― Stephenie Meyer, New Moon
2. “I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” ― Virginia Woolf
3. “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” ― Thomas Campbell
4. “The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.” ― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
5. “The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
6. “I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.” ― Beryl Markham, West with the Night
7. “One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.” ― Antonio Porchia
8. “If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
9. “I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes” ― Vladimir Nabokov
10. “What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
11. “It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.”
― Ally Condie, Matched
12. “Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
13. “There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.” ― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
14. “Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.” ― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
15. “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.” ― J.M. Barrie
16. “Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
17. “Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.” ― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
18. “Remember my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker” ― Bram Stoker, Dracula
19. “We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.” ― Alan Wilson Watts
20. “In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.” ― Octavia Butler
See also: 200 Greatest Life Lessons Quotes To Live Your Best Life
20 Loving And Happy Memory Quotes
1. “When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
2. “You should always be taking pictures, if not with a camera then with your mind. Memories you capture on purpose are always more vivid than the ones you pick up by accident.” ― Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
3. “Your memory feels like home to me.
So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds it’s way back to you.” ― Ranata Suzuki
4. “…the sad part is, that I will probably end up loving you without you for much longer than I loved you when I knew you.
Some people might find that strange.
But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.” ― Ranata Suzuki
5. “The town was paper, but the memories were not.” ― John Green, Paper Towns
6. “What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life–to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?” ― George Eliot, Adam Bede
7. “Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn’t give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. The scenery was the last thing on my mind.” ― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
8. “If you cannot hold me in your arms, then hold my memory in high regard.
And if I cannot be in your life, then at least let me live in your heart.” ― Ranata Suzuki
9. “If you’re searching for a quote that puts your feelings into words – you won’t find it.
You can learn every language and read every word ever written – but you’ll never find what’s in your heart.
How can you?
He has it.” ― Ranata Suzuki
10. “Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.” ― Vladimir Nabokov
11. “My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain…There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.” ― Chief Seattle, The Chief Seattle’s Speech
12. “I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.” ― Janet Fitch, White Oleander
13. “Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.”
― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns
14. “Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.” ― Ann Druyan
15. “When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable” ― Martin Amis, Other People
16. “Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.” ― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
17. “Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.” ― Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch
18. “Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.” ― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists
19. “A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we’re married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that’s why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he’s dead.” ― Andrew Sean Greer, The Story of a Marriage
20. “I think people would be happier if they admitted things more often. In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment – we are all defined by something we can’t change.” ― Simon Van Booy, The Illusion of Separateness
30 Sad Memory Quotes
1. “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” ― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
2. “The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” ― Milan Kundera, Ignorance
3. “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” ― Marcel Proust
4. “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.” ― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
5. “Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal. From an Irish headstone” ― Richard Puz, The Carolinian
6. “I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can’t believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can’t imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven’t been.” ― Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories
7. “Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it’s noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
8. “The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.” ― Lois Lowry, The Giver
9. “No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.” ― Haruki Murakami
10. “The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.” ― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
11. “Writers remember everything…especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he’ll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar.
Art consists of the persistence of memory.” ― Stephen King, Misery
12. “O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude…” ― George Eliot, O May I Join the Choir Invisible! And Other Favourite Poems
13. “That’s how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you’d have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.” ― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
14. “Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.” ― Han Kang, Human Acts
15. “I had someone once who made every day mean something.
And now…. I am lost….
And nothing means anything anymore.” ― Ranata Suzuki
16. “I miss that feeling of connection.
Knowing he was out there somewhere thinking about me at the same time I was thinking about him.” ― Ranata Suzuki
17. “If you didn’t remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn’t?” ― Jodi Picoult, Plain Truth
18. “People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things – where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance – but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting. I am exhausted from the effort to forget… There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.” ― Stephen Carpenter, Killer
19. “When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot. ” ― Ann Brashares, Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
20. “Because I might not always have you but I’ll have the feeling of you for the rest of my life”
21. “Loss alone is but the wounding of a heart; it is memory that makes it our ruin.” ― Brian Ruckley, Fall of Thanes
22. “People always talk like there’s a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn’t, at least not for me. I remember what I’ve imagined and imagine what I remember.” ― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down
23. “Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.” ― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
24. “You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It’s frightening how many people and things there are in a man’s past that have stopped moving. The living people we’ve lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.
As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.” ― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
25. “The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.” ― Saki, Reginald
26. “Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water.” ― Sherwood Smith, Crown Duel
27. “We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.” ― John Banville, The Sea
28. “I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights
29. “Remembering is easy. It’s forgetting that’s hard.” ― Brodi Ashton, Everneath
30. “There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost.” ― Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
30 Quotes About Remembering The Past
1. “What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.” ― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
2. “You know what I think?” she says. “That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed ’em to the fire, they’re all just paper. The fire isn’t thinking ‘Oh, this is Kant,’ or ‘Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,’ or ‘Nice tits,’ while it burns. To the fire, they’re nothing but scraps of paper. It’s the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there’s no distinction–they’re all just fuel.” ― Haruki Murakami, After Dark
3. “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” ― David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
4. “Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things–childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves–that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.” ― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
5. “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” ― William Faulkner, Light in August
6. “If you never tell anyone the truth about yourself, eventually you start to forget. The love, the heartbreak, the joy, the despair, the things I did that were good, the things I did that were shameful–if I kept them all inside, my memories of them would start to disappear. And then I would disappear.” ― Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
7. “How can you just forget a person completely until the moment you see his face again?”
― Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
8. “Wisdom comes through suffering.
Trouble, with its memories of pain,
Drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,
So men against their will
Learn to practice moderation.
Favours come to us from gods.” ― Aeschylus, Agamemnon
9. “Most have been forgotten. Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best. The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both.” ― George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
10. “Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.” ― William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor
11. “We’re constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.” ― S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep
12. “Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.” ― Will Self
13. “I am hopelessly in love with a memory.
An echo from another time, another place.” ― Michael Faudet
14. “Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You’ve crossed through nothingness or dream to another island in Time.” ― Roger Zelazny, Isle of the Dead
15. “Only one who loves can remember so well.” ― Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov
16. “I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.” ― Beryl Markham, West with the Night
17. “Isn’t it funny how the memories you cherish before a breakup can become your worst enemies afterwards? The thoughts you loved to think about, the memories you wanted to hold up to the light and view from every angle–it suddenly seems a lot safer to lock them in a box, far from the light of day and throw away the key. It’s not an act of bitterness. It’s an act if self-preservation. It’s not always a bad idea to stay behind the window and look out at life instead, is it?” ― Allyson Braithwaite Condie, First Day
18. “Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
19. “Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It’s amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn’t even pay attention to at the time, a place that you didn’t even know had a particular smell.” ― Emily Giffin, Something Borrowed
20. “Memories aren’t stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.” ― Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts
21. “I’ve never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don’t understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.” ― Sophia Loren
22. “The magic of the present moment that is warily stored in the granary of our memory may pop up at any time and usher us along the winding paths of our life, and light up the dead points in the dim curves of our journey.” ― Erik Pevernagie
23. “I sit quietly and think about my mom. It’s funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memories standing out.” ― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife
24. “What is human memory?” Manning asked. He gazed at the air as he spoke, as if lecturing an invisible audience – as perhaps he was. “It certainly is not a passive recording mechanism, like a digital disc or a tape. It is more like a story-telling machine. Sensory information is broken down into shards of perception, which are broken down again to be stored as memory fragments. And at night, as the body rests, these fragments are brought out from storage, reassembled and replayed. Each run-through etches them deeper into the brain’s neural structure. And each time a memory is rehearsed or recalled it is elaborated. We may add a little, lose a little, tinker with the logic, fill in sections that have faded, perhaps even conflate disparate events.
“In extreme cases, we refer to this as confabulation. The brain creates and recreates the past, producing, in the end, a version of events that may bear little resemblance to what actually occurred. To first order, I believe it’s true to say that everything I remember is false.” ― Arthur C. Clarke
25. “Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory” ― James Stephens, Irish Fairy Tales
26. “I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.” ― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
27. “I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?” ― Catherynne M. Valente, The Habitation of the Blessed
28. “We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
29. “Memory, which is very sensitive and hates to be found lacking, tends to fill in any gaps with its own spurious creations of reality, but more or less in line with the facts of which it has only a vague recollection, like what remains after the passing of a shadow.”
― José Saramago, All The Names
30. “I think the secret to a hoppy life is a selective memory. Remember what you are most grateful for and quickly forget what your not.” ― Richard Paul Evans, Grace
30 Short Memory Quotes
1. “Memory is more indelible than ink.” ― Anita Loos
2. “Remember tonight… for it is the beginning of always” ― Dante
3. “Every man’s memory is his private literature.” ― Aldous Huxley
4. “…when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.” ― Jane Austen, Persuasion
5. “Touch has a memory.” ― John Keats
6. “The price of a memory, is the memory of the sorrow it brings.” ― Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four
7. “The one charm about the past is that it is the past.” ― Oscar Wilde
8. “The past beats inside me like a second heart.” ― John Banville, The Sea
9. “A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.” ― Eudora Welty
10. “Scars are just another kind of memory.” ― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans
11. “Time’s the thief of memory” ― Stephen King, The Gunslinger
12. “I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.” ― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes
13. “Memory is the happiness of being alone.” ― Lois Lowry, Anastasia Krupnik
14. “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ says the White Queen to Alice.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass
15. “You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.” ― Amy Carmichael
16. “We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.” ― Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table
17. “Sometimes you can’t let go of the past without facing it again.” ― Gail Tsukiyama, The Samurai’s Garden
18. “I’d trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.” ― Kris Kristofferson
19. “He was both everything I could ever want…
And nothing I could ever have…” ― Ranata Suzuki
20. “Forgetfulness is a form of freedom.” ― Kahlil Gibran
21. “Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.” ― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
22. “Only those with no memory insist on their originality.” ― Coco Chanel
23. “Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.” ― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems
24. “The people you love become ghosts inside of you, and like this you keep them alive.”
― Rob Montgomery
25. “Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.” ― H.P. Lovecraft, The Rats in the Walls
26. “No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.” ― Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
27. “The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.” ― Marcus Tullius Cicero, Philippics
28. “Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.” ― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
29. “Memory believes before knowing remembers. ― William Faulkner, Light in August
30. “I will continue my path, but I will keep a memory always.” ― Rosie Thomas, Iris & Ruby
See also: 220 Best Sad Instagram Captions To Get It Off Your Chest
20 Memory Quotes You Should Think About
1. “Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.” ― W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays
2. “I’m like you,’ he said. ‘I remember everything.’
I stopped for a second. If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name” ― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
3. “Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!” ― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
4. “The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject… And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them… Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.” ― Seneca, Natural Questions
5. “There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.” ― Harold Pinter, Old Times
6. “Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.” ― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
7. “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.
— Great Expectations (1998) directed by Alfonso Cuarón”
8. “The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.” ― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
9. “Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, “We *told* you not to tell.” But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.” ― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
10. “We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.” ― Cesare Pavese
11. “The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.” ― Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude
12. “To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There’s much too little forgetting.” ― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades
13. “The general root of superstition : namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.” ― Francis Bacon, The Collected Works of Sir Francis Bacon
14. “Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.” ― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
15. “When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. ” ― Steiner G
16. “Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.” ― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
17. “She could sense it very clearly: for me, no less than for her, the past counted far more than the present, remembering something far more than possessing it. Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing, banal, inadequate … She understood me so well! My anxiety that the present ‘immediately’ turned into the past so that I could love it and dream about it at leisure was just like hers, was identical. It was ‘our’ vice, this: to go forwards with our heads forever turned back.” ― Giorgio Bassani
18. “Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.” ― William Butler Yeats
19. “Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that is no longer exists, continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time.” ― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
20. “You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand.” ― Edward O. Wilson
Final Word
I hope that you have found some wisdom or soothing words while reading my collection of the best memory quotes that I have found and gathered online!
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