Family Memory Sayings

#1. Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.

William Zinsser

#2. I was the first face you saw when you were born, you were bald as my hair ran black. Now yours the last face I saw before I died, your hair ran black, as I was bald.

Anthony Liccione

#3. Another family story is forges, one that father and son will laugh about for decades. This is how a legacy is built. One memory at a time.

Mitch Albom

#4. However amazing a dish looks, it is always the taste that lingers in your memory. Family and friends will appreciate a meal that tastes superb-even if you've brought the pan to the table.

Gordon Ramsay

#5. Perhaps we are given a mom that we might take into death the memory of a lullaby.

Robert Breault

#6. My first memory of the Rolling Stones is listening to 'Satisfaction' at a sixth-grade slumber party at a friend's house in Ankara, Turkey, where my family was living at the time. In the middle of our sleepover, my friend's dad stopped the record when he heard the words 'girlie action!'

Gayle King

#7. There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.

Colum McCann

#8. You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

Pope Francis

#9. In his family the dead were much discussed. He absorbed the content of these conversations and transmuted them into what passed for memory. This serves the purpose. The dead don't come back, to quibble or correct.

Hilary Mantel

#10. When I was a child I had a best friend who lived across the road from me. When her mother died unexpectedly it was like losing a member of my own family. I think I am still affected by the memory of that loss.

Margaret Mahy

#11. Chauncey seethed at the outrageous insult. "And your father?" he demanded, extending the sword. He didn't yet know all his vassals, but he was learning. He would brand the family name of this boy to memory.

Becca Fitzpatrick

#12. In loving memory from the Family.

Bugsy Siegel

#13. So who has more at stake? A young man trying to get laid with the least amount of white water before he ships off to his next assignment and has nothing but a memory of a nice month on the beach, or a family that desperately needs and wants old heartaches to disappear?

Roxanne St. Claire

#14. When I was your age, I would go to plays all the time, just sit in the darkness and try to take it all in inside me. Contain everything in some corner of my heart so that when I had my shot, it could all come pouring out - all the lights and moments and colour.

Brenna Ehrlich

#15. I love being at home now, improving my cooking. I've got a really bad memory, so my first attempts were a disaster - I'd forget what ingredients to put in. But I do a lasagna that's a crowd-pleaser, and a good lemon drizzle cake, which I take to my mom's for the Sunday roast to fatten the family up.

Katy B

#16. You get a letter from her agency embracing you into the family that says, 'It is our goal now to help you achieve your dream of being a songwriter, in John's memory.'

Arthur Godfrey

#17. I come from a family who prided themselves, both sides, on memory. And I was told growing up, constantly, that I was born with a really good memory.

Robbie Robertson

#18. I don't know what's my first real memory. When you're little, you're always looking forward to days that are special, like Christmas, birthdays, the Fourth of July, and family gatherings. But I can't pinpoint my earliest memory.

Ice Cube

#19. I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down the funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship's rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down.

Anne Lamott

#20. My first memory of loving music happened so early. We would always go to the beach in the summer and I would run from blanket to blanket, from family to family and just sing Lion King songs acapella.

Taylor Swift

#21. Every moment of our lives we make choices. Most we don't even know we're making, they're so dull or routine or automatic. Some are beyond explanation - like my mom choosing Wyatt's memory over Dad and me.

Laura Anderson Kurk

#22. And like that, the decades disappeared and the memory of that night came to life again. The way John had known it would. He didn't fight it, didn't work to stay in the here and now. If he was going to go back, then he wanted to relive it. All of it.

Karen Kingsbury

#23. When my family all got together, I'd always get up and entertain everyone, but it was all a bit of a joke. My first real memory of singing for people was when I was about eleven or 12.

Duffy

#24. The world is crazy. You need a license to drive a car and go fishing. You don't need a license to start a family. Two people have sex and BAM! Perfectly innocent kid is born whose life will be screwed up by her parents forever.

Laurie Halse Anderson

#25. As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

Ayelet Waldman

#26. Migration gives a blank cheque to put anything you don't feel like addressing in the memory hold. No neighbours can go against the monster narrative of your family.

Junot Diaz

#27. Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.

William Zinsser

#28. The first pages of memory are like the old family Bible. The first leaves are wholly faded and somewhat soiled with handling. But, when we turn further, and come to the chapters where Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise, then, all begins to grow clear and legible.

Max Muller

#29. My favorite memory is Tomorrow. Tomorrow's family moments are what I look forward to every day. No single favorite. Just Tomorrow.

Nigel Barker

#30. You know you are getting old when yesterday turns out to be a fading memory you have difficulties recollecting, when today becomes a challenge that is hard to grasp and when tomorrow promises an uncertainty that you dread encountering.

Janvier Chouteu-Chando

#31. Unk, standing at a porthole, wept quietly. He was weeping for love, for family, for friendship, for truth, for civilization. The things he wept for were all abstractions, since his memory could furnish few faces or artifacts with which his imagination might fashion a passion play.

Kurt Vonnegut

#32. In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer.

Adam Sisman

#33. Vacations in my family are rare events squeezed between races. I can count them on one hand, and even those amount to only a few hours each. Shopping in Los Angeles. Sinking my toes into snow white sand in Florida. They are tiny slips of memory strung around horses.

Mara Dabrishus

#34. A sister is the cure for swollen heads and ego trips. One may a star, a Chief Executive-famous and rich and beautiful. But one's sister has the family photo album. And a long, long memory. And a tendency to wink at one on Top Occasions.

Pam Brown

#35. Sometimes the bridges you burn light the way out of your darkness, but the memory of the blaze will be burned into your heart and mind forever.

Shannon L. Alder

#36. My work has made me tolerant of memory mistakes by family and friends. You don't have to call them lies. I think we could be generous and say maybe this is a false memory.

Elizabeth Loftus

#37. I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.

Chuck Close

#38. For a long time, I tried to make my ilfe work, to make our family work. I got tired, though. Five children wears you out until the only thing left inside you, the only thing you've got to give, is a memory of what you thought you'd be.

Amy Franklin-Willis

#39. Nothing in our daily life offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time's constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does our National Pastime.

Ken Burns

#40. Having experienced personally and through my family the tragedy of Chile is something always present in my memory. I do not want events of that nature ever to happen again, and I have dedicated an important part of my life to ensuring that and to the reunion of all Chileans.

Michelle Bachelet

#41. There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren't even a memory, you're only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

Anthony Marra

#42. I could hear you, talking to the daffodils and tulips, whispering to the fairies that lived inside their petals. Each separate flower had a different family inside it.

Lucy Christopher

#43. Smell brings to mind ... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.

Diane Ackerman

#44. My earliest memory is making peach cobbler with my grandmother. A wonderful memory. I grew up in a restaurant family - B.B.Q. restaurant.

Rick Bayless

#45. All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.

V.S. Pritchett

#46. My black-headed black-eyed boy. I remember every day of you. How would I forget?

Jamie O'Neill

#47. Come morning, his memory would be of a night spent watching over them all. And each of them - dog and boy, mother and old man - would feel the same.

David Wroblewski

#48. I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop - it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics; but I trust my family jewels only to Linux.

Donald Knuth

#49. Men were often far different in their roles as fathers than they were as suitors, the memories of which kept them, out of necessity, both vigilant and violent, and even in tender moments, to their daughters.

James Anderson

#50. It's as though all the terms of a family were present at one time rather than his dad and his mum. Not just a present authority, but the resident memory of what qualifies what else is the case.

Robert Creeley

#51. Maybe the hardest thing about moving over seas was being in a place where no one but your own family had any memory of you. It was like putting yourself back together in little pieces.

Naomi Shibab Nye

#52. This we know, the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. So hold in your mind the memory on the land as it is when you take it. And, with all your strength, with all your mind, and with all your heart ...

Chief Seattle

#53. Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.

Michael Ignatieff

#54. I still went to church regularly every Sunday; that is we all went there together. I reverenced the family pew where we had assembled for so many years; and apart from that reason I hold it dear because it is associated in my memory with my mother.

Pierre Loti