The Memory Book Quotes

#1. People have no memory of phone numbers now because of the cell phone - their address book is in a cell phone.

Gordon Bell

#2. History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue.

Anne Michaels

#3. Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn't this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn't it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written?

Orhan Pamuk

#4. Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds it's way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory ...

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#5. In that book which is my memory,
On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you,
Appear the words, 'Here begins a new life'.

Dante Alighieri

#6. I once had a book on the stars but now I don't. My memory serves but not stellar, ha. So I made up constellations. I made a Bear and a Goat but maybe not where they are supposed to be, I made some for the animals that once were, the ones I know about.

Peter Heller

#7. It is one thing to remember, another to know. To remember is to safeguard something entrusted to the memory. But to know is to make each thing one's own, not depend on the text and always to look back to the teacher. "Zeno said this, Cleanthes said this." Let there be space between you and the book.

Seneca The Younger

#8. Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them

Charles Caleb Colton

#9. My problem is that while other people are reading fifty books I'm reading one book fifty times. I only stop when at the bottom of page 20, say, I realise I can recite pages 21 and 22 from memory. Then I put the book away for a few years.

Helene Hanff

#10. Letter from Griffith-- "I know it is difficult, but do work harder to control yourself. Mother was beside herself with worry when she found you rolling on the floor laughing over a book you were reading."
The memory brought a curve to Miranda's lips. It had been a very funny book.

Kristi Ann Hunter

#11. This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.

Ernest Hemingway,

#12. What appear to be depravity, injury, or extinction are merely traces of memory and experience obscuring the soul. These are merely shadows of the soul, never its substance. The soul itself is always pure and whole.

Ilchi Lee

#13. I don't know, Mom. Now that I'm about to graduate, I plan on being more spontaneous."
Mom opened her eyes and burst out laughing.
I said, "Got spontaneity on the calendar for next Tuesday.

Lara Avery

#14. The memory of a book, Dana mused as she turned off the light and headed out of the room. Wouldn't life be so easy if that's all we needed to feel comforted?

Juliette Fay

#15. But before she'd start reading, she'd pass the book around to the students. Each child had to inhale the pages, thereby infusing the scent and memory as one into their subconscious.

Carmen DeSousa

#16. The words were before him, and yet I thought he wasn't reading them from the paper, but from the pages of his memory, from the open book of his heart.

Diana Gabaldon

#17. The railroads once were a dominant power in American life, for good and for ill. There's something inevitably nostalgic about a train book today. Trains attract us, but part of that attraction is cultural memory.

Brian Floca

#18. Do you suppose I would learn you the way a scholar learns a book? That you are nothing to me but a collection of suppositions, to be stored in my memory and written down for verification? No, Margaret. I know you.

Courtney Milan

#19. The ability to forget is a blessing, just like memory is.

Marwane Caber

#20. I took in the thick night air, the sweet smell of honeysuckle, the chirping of frogs, to impress the moment in the folds of my memory, preserve it like a flower between pages of a book. To remember: This is how it feels to be happy.

Laura McHugh

#21. The book, and its offspring the periodical, which hold more knowledge than one human memory can retain, have long served as extensions to human memories.

Frederick G. Kilgour

#22. [When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

#23. And in the end, he would become a memory, pressed in my heart like a leaf in my book.

Jenny Han

#24. By the time these words are read, the centuries-old cedar, hemlock, and balsm of the cutblock known as Leah Block 2 will be a distant memory, long since processed into siding, two-by-fours, perhaps even the paper that has been recycled into the pages of this book.

John Vaillant

#25. TO
MY COLLABORATOR
who buys the ink and paper
laughs
and, in fact, does all the really difficult
part of the business
this book is gratefully dedicated
in memory of a winter's morning
in Switzerland

A.A. Milne

#26. When I wiped you from the book of memory, I did not know I was striking out half my life

Nizar Qabbani

#27. Sometimes a glance, a few casual words, fragments of a melody floating through the quiet air of a summer evening, a book that accidentally comes into hands, a poem or memory-laden fragrance may bring about the impulse which changes and determines our whole life.

Anagarika Govinda

#28. The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.

Susan Sontag

#29. The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory.

Jonathan Lethem

#30. And although he tried every day to remember the promise he'd made to her, every day it became more and more remote, until it was just a memory, and so was she, a beloved character from a book he'd read long ago.

Hanya Yanagihara

#31. I recognize that I'm probably the luckiest novelist in recent memory, because Sherman Alexie, a writer I greatly admire, raved about my book on 'The Colbert Report,' and then Mr. Colbert himself urged his viewers to buy it - on his show and on Twitter.

Edan Lepucki

#32. Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.

Christopher Hitchens

#33. If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.

Benjamin Franklin

#34. I believe that the devil has destroyed many good books of the church, as, aforetime, he killed and crushed many holy persons, the memory of whom has now passed away; but the Bible he was fain to leave subsisting.

Martin Luther

#35. Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

Walter Benjamin

#36. Dedicated to the memory of MY FATHER. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could toward making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book.

Leonard Darwin

#37. I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

Kim Edwards

#38. I like a book to be full of the memory of what it is, a voice in an endless conversation, and yet at the same time to be new.

Marilynne Robinson

#39. What is true for book publishing is true for civilization: the books that survive the test of time are humanity's backlist, our collective memory.

Jason Epstein

#40. A great many complimentary things have been said about the faculty of memory, and if you look in a good quotation book you will find them neatly arranged.

Robertson Davies

#41. I would advise you to read with a pen in your hand and enter in a little book short hints of what you feel that is common or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such portcullis in your memory.

Benjamin Franklin

#42. That's the problem with history, we like to think it's a book - that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn't the paper it's printed on. It's memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.

Paul Beatty

#43. It was too long ago; she couldn't recall the feelings of love, only remember that she'd had them. A dried-out memory, like a flower pressed between the pages of a book.

Sarah Painter

#44. Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.

Susan Sontag

#45. If you ask my wife, the biggest fault is my inability around the house. She says the only thing handy about me is that I'm close by. And, I have a terrible memory. I'm bad at saying no. I often double-book. There are a lot of things.

Hugh Jackman

#46. Does it matter that people and things
Have words,
Have names?
If not,
Why read any book?
A litany of useless letters
Detached from bone, muscle.
Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,
Person
Real?

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#47. To Savor The Scene, A Book, or A Friend.

Barbara Shook Hazen

#48. We are the things we don't remember,
the blank spaces, the forgotten words.

Cecilia Ruiz

#49. The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.

Ian McEwan

#50. If all the historic books of the Bible were blotted from the memory of mankind, nothing of value would be lost..

Robert Green Ingersoll

#51. 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

#52. The Bible in the memory is better than the Bible in the book case.

Charles Spurgeon

#53. The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#54. And maybe I'm a liar and I do need it, because being kissed by Josh Bennet is kind of like being saved. It's a promise and a memory of the future and a book of better stories.

Katja Millay

#55. In every man's memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#56. And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

John Irving

#57. The ultimate luxury is to reread: to revisit a book to see how time has treated it, how memory has distorted it, or how my own passing years have cast a new light on it.

Michael Upchurch

#58. Life was an uncertain thing, and there were some moments one wished to remember, to imprint upon one's mind that the memory might be taken out later, like a flower pressed between the pages of a book, and admired and recollected anew. - Sophie and Gideon Lightwood

Cassandra Clare

#59. Some things don't last forever, but some things do. Like a good song, or a good book, or a good memory you can take out and unfold in your darkest times, pressing down on the corners and peering in close, hoping you still recognize the person you see there.

Sarah Dessen

#60. Her address book confirmed it, the pages inhabited equally by the living and the dead ... Each name called up raucous dinner parties and gin-and-tonics on sunny patios, lazy Saturday afternoons at the swim club, station wagons filled with noisy boys in polyester baseball uniforms.

Stewart O'Nan