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Memory quotes

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“The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.” George Orwell, “1984” - 1949

“Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so study without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.” Leonardo da Vinci, “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci” - 1478 – 1519

“What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time?” William Shakespeare, “The Tempest” - 1623

“Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.” Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice” - 28 January 1813

“Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” George Orwell, “1984” - 1949

“We only labour to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.” Michel de Montaigne, “The Essays of Michel de Montaigne” - 1580

“Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only.” Albert Camus, “The Plague” - 1947

“If you remember me, then I don't care if everybody else forgets.” Haruki Murakami, “Kafka on the Shore” - 2002

“Memory . . . is the diary that we all carry about with us.” Oscar Wilde, “The Importance of Being Earnest” - 1895

“It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards” Lewis Carroll, “Through the Looking-Glass” - 1871

“Remember, my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker.” Bram Stoker, “Dracula” - 1897

“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” - 1944

“A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is that ability to remember the story of every scar.” Stephen King, “Misery” - 1987

“Praising what is lost makes the remembrance dear.” William Shakespeare, “All's Well That Ends Well” - 1623

“The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.” George Eliot, “Middlemarch” - 1872

“If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Underworld in a second, and examined it at leisure.” H. G. Wells, “The Time Machine” - 1895

“I ask no more than to live a hundred years longer, that I may have more time to dwell the longer on your memory.” Jules Verne, “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea” - 1870

“We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavour to efface them.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorrows of Young Werther” - 1774

“Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” - 1858

“We might call what lies at the foundation of this process the memory of the heart; it is much more intimate than that of the head.” Arthur Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Representation” - 1819

“A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future, but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.” Honoré de Balzac, “Letters of Two Brides” - 1841

“It is a chain of recollections—an idea which carries you back to other times, to other places—which, very likely, have no connection with the present time and place.” Alexandre Dumas, “The Count of Monte Cristo” - 1845

“We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library.” Carl Sagan, “Cosmos” - 1980

“The truth is that no mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.” Samuel Johnson, “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia” - 1759

“So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.” Albert Camus, “The Plague” - 1947

“Either I forget immediately or I never forget.” Samuel Beckett, “Waiting for Godot” - 1953

“In memory everything seems to happen to music.” Tennessee Williams, “The Glass Menagerie” - 1944

“But unshed tears can turn you rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning.” Margaret Atwood, “The Blind Assassin” - 2000

“Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.” Milan Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” - 1984

“In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body.” William James, “The Varieties of Religious Experience” - 1902

“I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life.” Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet” - 1929

“when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.” Jane Austen, “Persuasion” - 1816

“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” - 2012

“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?” Haruki Murakami, “Norwegian Wood” - 1987

“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.” Milan Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” - 1984

“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. But since my duty has not been incompatible with the admission of that remembrance, I have given it a place in my...” Charles Dickens, “Great Expectations” - 1861

“Memories mean more to me than dresses.” Anne Frank, “The Diary of a Young Girl” - 1947

“He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.” Virginia Woolf, “To the Lighthouse” - 1927

“By the time you read this, you’ll be older than you remember.” Chuck Palahniuk, “Diary” - 2003

“You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don’t recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble?” J. K. Rowling, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” - 1999

“And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.” George MacDonald, “Phantastes” - 1858

“And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of...” Marcel Proust, “Swann's Way” - 1913

“People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The Brothers Karamazov” - 1880

“Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Beautiful and Damned” - 1922

“It's in vain . . . to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.” Charles Dickens, “David Copperfield” - 1850

“He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.” Edith Wharton, “The Age of Innocence” - 1920

“Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure—an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?” Charlotte Brontë, “Jane Eyre” - 16 October 1847

“Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.” Haruki Murakami, “Dance Dance Dance” - 1994

“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste...” Marcel Proust, “Swann's Way” - 1913

“Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror” J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Fellowship of the Ring” - 1954

Related topics

past time love forgetting loss present life knowledge beauty pleasure heart remembrance education moment trust music conscience blindness truth emotions

Related authors

William Shakespeare (3)
Haruki Murakami (3)
Jane Austen (2)
George Orwell (2)
Charles Dickens (2)
Albert Camus (2)
Tennessee Williams (2)
Milan Kundera (2)
Marcel Proust (2)
Oscar Wilde (1)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1)
J. K. Rowling (1)
Lewis Carroll (1)
Charlotte Brontë (1)
John Green (1)
George Eliot (1)
H. G. Wells (1)
Virginia Woolf (1)
Bram Stoker (1)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1)

Related sources

1984 (2)
The Plague (2)
The Glass Menagerie (2)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (2)
Swann's Way (2)
Romeo and Juliet (1)
All's Well That Ends Well (1)
The Tempest (1)
Pride and Prejudice (1)
The Importance of Being Earnest (1)
The Beautiful and Damned (1)
Jane Eyre (1)
The Fault in Our Stars (1)
Middlemarch (1)
The Time Machine (1)
Dracula (1)
The Brothers Karamazov (1)
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1)
The Age of Innocence (1)
The Sorrows of Young Werther (1)