Top 100 Quotes About Memory And The Past
#1. Sometimes those experiences crowd back upon the memory, and the past flashes back like a distant peak momentarily lighted up by sunbeam piercing through the clouds. Then oblivion again. Strange it is how the prosaic present may hide the exciting past.
Whipplesnaith
#2. The halcyon days of childhood, a time when everything lay open before him, when the most minor episodes could be construed as events and every chance encounter ... gave rise to fresh insights.
Ivan Klima
#3. Memory cuts both ways; it can either provide you with tremendous strength and a foundation to carry you through your life, or it can be a demon that just ruins your present and your future because you can't let go of the past.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#4. Memory is a great deceiver, grief and longing cloud the past, and recollections, even vivid ones, fade.
Daniel Alarcon
#5. Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion - and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined.
Daniel Kahneman
#6. Memory is that trick by which we see the awful events of the past loom over the good, like mountains over mouse. We don't recall life as it was. Instead, we remember what was different, frightening, or strange, and we turn our lives into the fun-house mirror images of the truth.
Jamie Kain
#7. 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
#8. That the past is one lie, and the memory has no returning, becouse every old spring is beyond retrieve, and even the craziest and most persistent love is just a temporary truth ...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#9. God is more powerful than anybody's past, no matter how wretched. He can make us forget - not by erasing the memory but by taking the sting and paralyzing effect out of it
Jim Cymbala
#10. We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#11. For when an old man relives his life, he lives it only by dwelling upon his memories; and when wisdom in an old man has outgrown the immediate impressions of life, the past viewed from the quiet of memory is something different from the present in all its bustle. The
Soren Kierkegaard
#12. Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action.
James Luceno
#13. The older I got the more I appreciated the role of travel as a stimulus to memories, and the way in which journeys even to new places were somehow always awakening memories of places seen in an ever-receding past.
Michael Jacobs
#14. The 1984 European Championships were held in France and that was something important. I felt on form then, even though I was practically always injured at all the World Cups. It's a great memory. But in any case, the past is past.
Michel Patini
#15. ...Past joys and achievements give us the outlines of how to get to a state of happiness again. That memory is a treasure that can never be taken away. At least we know where we were, what we have lost, what we miss and what more to add to our experiences.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#16. Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#17. When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered ... the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls ... bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory
Marcel Proust
#18. I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to
Edwidge Danticat
#19. 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.
Madame De Stael
#20. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats.
Oscar Wilde
#21. Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.
Terence McKenna
#22. But, memory paints impressionistic portraits of the past, enhancing some images and blurring others. To her,
Monique Martin
#24. A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.
Grandma Moses
#25. When you can see your life in retrospect, the romanticism of how good things once were gives way to the reality that positives and negatives comprise every day and every decade. (235)
Victoria Moran
#26. Memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain.
Colm Toibin
#27. The rich of this world will vanish like smoke, and no memory of their past pleasures will remain. But even in their lifetime they do not enjoy them without bitterness, weariness and fear, for the very things whence they derive their pleasures often carry with them the seeds of sorrow.
Thomas A Kempis
#28. At 86, I can easily look back to the last eight decades. Though memory often fails me now, so many images of the past are still clearly polished, and I can yet recall not just an abiding sense of place, but the keen smells, the sensory responses to the events of that past.
F. Sionil Jose
#29. I miss you because memory
is a kind editor.
The past is a long scroll and
in it is the story of us,
told with gentle metaphor, and
words that bring
you back and back, even as you
lie there, lying.
Corey Mesler
#30. Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything to the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past.
Cesar Aira
#31. Reiko had not kept a diary and was now denied the pleasure of assiduously rereading her record of the happiness of the past few months and consigning each page to the fire as she did so.
- Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
Yukio Mishima
#32. Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
Milan Kundera
#33. I note that I've lived longer in the past now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past stays, and I wouldn't mind forgetting more of it.
Denis Johnson
#34. Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.
Rollo May
#35. The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.
Siri Hustvedt
#36. Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mist of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.
Margaret Thatcher
#37. I now know how your anger
came from skeletons
that rattled in your heart
and you couldn't escape them.
Susie Clevenger
#38. I don't write diaries and things like that, but I have a fantastic memory. I call that like a magic carpet. I can really concentrate and travel back in the past I don't know how many years from now and evoke that space if I wanted.
Francoise Gilot
#39. It was very pleasant to savor its aroma, for smells have the power to evoke the past, bringing back sounds and even other smells that have no match in the present. -Tita
Laura Esquivel
#41. Remembering God's work in the past has a sustaining and renewing effect during times of spiritual drought. Memory and worship are thus keys to a long life of spiritual formation. Try
Richard J. Foster
#42. If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.
Julian Barnes
#43. Reframing your past painful experiences and seeing them in a humorous light takes away the power and emotional charge attached to the memory of the hurtful event.
Miya Yamanouchi
#44. A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.
George Santayana
#45. I suppose being the kind of creatures we [people] are, we like to censor the past, and are selective, or want to be selective about the things that we remember. If you want to destroy people, destroy their memory, destroy their history.
Desmond Tutu
#46. The past wasn't dead, nor past. She herself was black, and was explaining the demographic of the Black Belt today by referring to slavery, still a visitable memory because of the persistence of its effects.
Paul Theroux
#47. it was not even imaginative; it lives in my memory mainly as a period of humdrum, prosaic happiness and awakes none of the poignant nostalgia with which I look back on my much less happy boyhood. It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past. To
C.S. Lewis
#48. The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.
Michel Faber
#49. But like always when I try to place my thoughts in the past and hide there, the fear close at hand seeps in through the memory.
Ken Kesey
#50. Desiree. It's like falling in love every night and having your heart broken every morning ... Having more memory is just a way of distorting a greater amount of the past.
Craig Clevenger
#51. And of the fact that every vision of the past is a vision of the blind
Jacques Roubaud
#52. Most of the time, life is all "What's next?" "Who's next?" "Where the HELL am I going, please?" But on anniversaries, you take the time to stop and look back and it's like watching a play of your past dance across your memory. At
Holly Bourne
#53. Memory is that element in our consciousness that connects the past with the present. If we had no memory, there would be only one moment of our life, the moment we call now, and we would never consciously recognize more than this single moment.
Gustaf Stromberg
#54. Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me, neither option is worth pursuing.
John Shelby Spong
#55. Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.
Siri Hustvedt
#56. The memory of things become the reality of things.
Or maybe the past is not permanent. Maybe the tree has
said its fill, and leaves us with an image of ourselves.
Richard Jackson
#57. Memory, the priestess, kills the present and offers its heart to the shrine of the dead past.
Rabindranath Tagore
#58. He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he'd landed and made his life, was not his,
Jhumpa Lahiri
#59. She smiles, and her eyes look as if they can see back into her memory, into all the things that have gone into making a person what they are.
Lois Lowry
#60. Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain.
Don DeLillo
#61. Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface.
Ron Rash
#62. Its not that he didn't appreciate his dishwasher. There was something about washing dishes by hand that was therapeutic, as if he could wash away the regrets of the past and photos he wanted to wipe out of his memory forever.
James L. Rubart
#63. If we live out of our memory, we're tied to the past and to that which is finite. When we live out of our imagination,
we're tied to that which is infinite.
Stephen Covey
#64. Memory is not a simple replay. The bits of information that we recover from the past are often influenced by our knowledge, beliefs and feelings.
Daniel Schacter
#65. This is the time to make those hard decisions and let things go. Ask yourself, "Is this item part of my past or my future?" If it's sentimental, take a picture and let it go! Save the memory in a picture, but not on your shelf.
Marcia Ramsland
#66. The past and present are after all so close, almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.
Iris Murdoch
#67. Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.
Paulo Coelho
#68. Forget about the past. It does not exist, except in your memory. Drop it. And stop worrying about how you're going to get through tomorrow. Life is going on right here, right now - pay attention to that and all will be well.
Neale Donald Walsch
#69. Maybe the past is supposed to fade-and that's actually a kindness of human memory.
Katherine Center
#70. The ordinary man is aware of his surroundings, first, by naming and labelling them; second, by linking them with past memory of them; and third, by relating them to his own personal self. The illumined egoless man is simply aware of them, without any of these other added activities.
Paul Brunton
#71. I slipped from present to past, sliding down the snake heads of memory into what was and what would never be again.
John Connolly
#72. Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it. (74)
Stephen Levine
#73. Language is the memory of man. Without it he has no past, a paltry present, and an empty future. With it he can bring his dreams to life.
Edward R. Murrow
#74. Through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.
Frederick Buechner
#75. The power of collective memory does not lie in its accurate, systematic, or sophisticated mapping of the past, but in establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance.
Yael Zerubavel
#76. Do you think the memory of someone should dictate how we live going forward?' he asks, threading and unthreading his fingers together.
'It depends,' I say. 'I think you can probably honor someone's memory, but you can't live for them, because that means living in the past.
Alexandra Bracken
#77. The memory of the pain did not destroy the reality of the pleasure; grief did not obliterate joy.
Orson Scott Card
#78. People misunderstood death, they died not of too little life but of too much life, that as the skin withered and the future grew short it was the past that took on flesh, until ultimately the sheer accumulation of experience and memory became too heavy to carry.
Dorothy Gilman
#79. The false self lives mainly through memory and anticipation. Past and future are its main preoccupation.
Eckhart Tolle
#80. But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright son has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.
Because they have no memory ... because they are not human.
Herman Melville
#81. From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.
Jane Hamilton
#82. 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
#83. Memory was a slippery thing - slick moss on an unstable slope - and it was ever so easy to lose one's footing and fall
Kelly Barnhill
#84. The Old Days, the Lost Days
in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened to those certain songs.
Beryl Markham
#85. The forest would close its arms and that would be that. Joburg would be a mythical memory, a place of the past, of adventure stories for children, of warnings not to get lost.
Andrew Miller
#86. The judgment: You are now before Yama, King of the Dead. In vain will you try to ... deny or conceal the evil deeds you have done ... the mirror in which Yama seems to read your past is your own memory, and also his judgment is your own. It is you yourself who pronounce your own judgment, ...
Gautama Buddha
#87. The past doesn't exist except as a memory, a mental story, and though past events aren't changeable, your stories about them are. You can act now to transform the way you tell the story of your past, ultimately making it a stalwart protector of your future.
Martha Beck
#88. If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God.
Pope Francis
#89. In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.
Dwight Yoakam
#90. Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits.
Frederick Buechner
#91. The arrow of time obscures memory of both past and future circumstance with innumerable fallacies, the least trivial of which is perception.
Ashim Shanker
#92. Whatever happened to me just now has gotten to me, broken past the fragile shell I've built. More than my memory is gone. My soul has wings that beat to a heart I don't understand and I see things, feel things that I know aren't from here, but that are so real.
Elizabeth Scott
#93. But past service counted for little these days. The world, and those who governed it, moved too quickly to be carrying such burdens as memory and gratitude.
Brian Ruckley
#94. In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.
Anne Bogart
#95. Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.
From an Irish headstone
Richard Puz
#96. Love in the past is only a memory. Love in the future is only a fantasy. True love lives in the here and now.
Gautama Buddha
#97. In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there's a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone's asleep, they go erasing the past. It's like a bad Ray Bradbury story - 'The Memory Erasers'.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#98. All events of the past withered to mere skeletons, veined and fleshed of fancy.
Ashim Shanker
#99. To die is to love. The beauty of love is not in past remembrances or in the images of tomorrow. Love has no past and no future; what has, is memory, which is not love. Love with its passion is just beyond the range of society, which is you. Die, and it is there.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#100. At some point, most of us stop living out of imagination and start living out of memory. Instead of creating the future, we start repeating the past. Instead of living by faith, we live by logic. Instead of going after our dreams, we stop circling Jericho. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Mark Batterson
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