Top 100 The Memory Of Things Quotes
#1. I would have no need for the Memory Of Things past if those which were Present were more agreeable
Peter Ackroyd
#2. The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.
Louis Armstrong
#3. But that age ... exerts on us
An almost terrible charm,
Like the memory of things seen
And a life lived in dreams.
Heinrich Heine
#5. 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
#6. We only really remember things for five years. After that, what we remember, what's actually etched in our brain is our memory of the thing, not the thing itself. And five years after that, what's left is our memory of the memory.
Laura Dave
#7. Things severed shall be united and shall acquire of themselves such virtue that they shall restore to men their lost memory: - That is the papyrus sheets, which are formed out of several strips and preserve the memory of the thoughts and deeds of men.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#8. If you knew you were
going to lose your memory
but you could choose five things
you'd never forget, what would they be -
a certain face, a taste, a scent,
a touch; how deep
in this, the middle
of your life?
Kristen Henderson
#9. My brain tends to take the scenic route. Things come to the forefront of my mind sooner or later, it just takes time.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#10. Secrets are dark things. They don't exist in the light. They
glow faintly in forgotten corners, in mysterious mind-nooks,
in lost memory maps. Secrets are the shadows of the soul.
Sukanya Venkatraghavan
#11. One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.
Zhou Enlai
#12. It had given her pleasure to do things for him in his lifetime, and now it was a pleasure to do things for his memory. But the memory of a father went only so far.
Alexander McCall Smith
#13. I try to remember the things that keep me peaceful, happy, and compassionate. I constantly write notes on my phone about little discoveries I make in terms of perspective and habitual thought patterns. My memory seems to let me down, so this really helps me.
Richard Brancatisano
#14. After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.
James Baldwin
#15. Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art.
Mark Helprin
#16. The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory
of this there is no doubt.
Orhan Pamuk
#17. In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you. The only help you'll get is a few hard drinks and morning.
James Sallis
#18. Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
Marcel Proust
#19. 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
#20. The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#21. When you have gaps in your memory like I do, you come to better appreciate the things you do remember. The way your hands just repeat a task you've done enough times, without even needing to think. Who needs Legacies when we have the infinite power of the human mind at our disposal?
Pittacus Lore
#22. Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lost
Kevin Arnold
#23. Oft it may be chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were heedful for the wise to know.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#24. 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
#25. Alan Watts, the Buddhist scholar, proposed the existence of a mental faculty he called forgettory, which is the flip side of memory. There are times, Watts maintained, when we need to forget things, to let them slip away into the unremembered past.
Larry Dossey
#26. There are things in this world that the children hear, but whose sounds oscillate below an adult's sense of pitch.
Edmund De Waal
#27. Forgiveness is the key that can unshackle us from a past that will not rest in the grave of things over and done with. As long as our minds are captive to the memory of having been wronged, they are not free to wish for reconciliation with the one who wronged us.
Lewis B. Smedes
#28. Mysterious power, whence hope ethereal springs!
Sweet heavenly relic of eternal things!
Inspiring oft deep thoughts of things divine:
The past, the present, and the future time.
Thy reminiscences transport the soul
To memory?s Paradise?its future goal.
Parley P. Pratt
#29. The things we remember are what we hold on to. And what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives.
Katherine Center
#30. You're an actor, you want to do a scene in class. But one of the things I've always had is I've always had a really good memory. So I would go and watch a movie and then I would see a scene in the movie and I go, hey I'd like to do that in class this Wednesday.
Quentin Tarantino
#32. Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.
Alma Guillermoprieto
#33. Don't squander beautiful moments by always trying to snap the perfect picture or record the event on film. Sometimes it's better to watch things as they happen with your own eyes, knowing that the memory of the experience will always be with you.
Rachel Nichols
#34. I had never seen a prison, nor had I even imagined one, but there is a racial memory in man that instinctively knows of these things. The architecture of misery has an unmistakable look and feel about it.
Bryce Courtenay
#35. Carry in your memory, for the rest of your life, the good things that came out of those difficulties. They will serve as a proof of your abilities and will give you confidence when you are faced by other obstacles.
Paulo Coelho
#36. I think it's always hard for children to talk about abuse because it is only memory. I didn't carry around a tape recorder ... I didn't chisel anything in stone ... Anybody can look and say, 'Well how do you know for sure?' And that's one of the most painful things about it. You don't.
Anne Heche
#37. I only know two things in life for certain: I know I love her and I know when her memory of our time together fades, I'll still feel exactly the same as I do today. Time is irrelevant, as I once said to her. And I'm happy wasting every second of it on her.
Kelly Moran
#38. I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.
Edgar Allan Poe
#39. Dr. Urbino replied without looking at her: "I did not know that fellow was a poet." And then he wiped him from his memory, because among other things, his profession had accustomed him to the ethical management of forgetfulness.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#40. There was carpet under Blanchefleur's feet and the scent of clean and delicate things in her nostrils - perfume, babies, soap, and tea. Homesickness hit her like a clenched fist; this was worse than memory.
Suzannah Rowntree
#41. All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.
Paul Klee
#42. Happiness is found in the simplest of things. Happiness is found in gratitude, in a kept promise, in a good conversation, in love, in friendship, in an achieved goal, in a fond memory; in all the simple magnificence of life.
Steve Maraboli
#43. Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#44. If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.
John Keats
#45. With a perfect memory did not come a perfect mind, or resolute decisions. Sometimes with perfection on one end of the equation, one was left with stark imprecision on the other. Perhaps it was nature's way of balancing things.
David Baldacci
#46. And this haunting and lonely memory is due probably to the combination of two things: the ghastly imitation of swarming life and metropolitan gaiety in the scene, and the almost total absence of life itself.
Thomas Wolfe
#47. It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.
[from "The Circus Animals' Desertion"]
W.B.Yeats
#48. What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.
Neil Gaiman
#49. Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#50. The three indispensable of genius are: understanding, feeling, and perseverance; the three things that enrich genius are: contentment of mind, the cherishing of good thoughts, and the exercise of memory
Robert Southey
#51. [Beveridge] was a driven man, right to the end; his last words, enunciated clearly from his death bed at the age of eighty-four, showed that the aging social reformer was still haunted by the memory of those sick men on the East London streets. 'I have a thousand things to do,' he said, and died.
T.R. Reid
#52. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things -
Dan Simmons
#53. She had been half willing to sponge out what she had seen and heard, creep back to New York, and make him a memory. A memory of the three of them, Atticus, Jem, and her, when things were uncomplicated and people did not lie.
Harper Lee
#54. 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
#55. One of the things about working for an old school studio like Warner Bros. is that there is an institutional culture and institutional memory, in terms of production design, camera work, and directors who understand how to do this kind of thing.
Bruno Heller
#56. 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
#57. How fickle it is, memory - preferring some days to others, granting first a blue sky, offering next the sound of laughter, swelling our remembrances until a largeness seeps into the grain of things and memory itself becomes billowed and flapping.
Sonja Livingston
#58. The outsourcing of our memory to machines expands the amount of data to which we have access, but degrades our brain's own ability to remember things.
Douglas Rushkoff
#59. Destruction is creation. Become as a little child. Language as space, a kind of mathematical notation, geometric locations in the lab of memory. Reading. Maps. Codes, substitutions, the secret names of things. The glorious inrush of a word. The joy of chatter. Every color's wavelength, by number.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#60. Some of the things floating about in the Well of Memory are not worth recording.
Margaret Deland
#61. Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.
Neil Gaiman
#62. People usually will remember people most, for the stupid things they did, than the impressionable ones. This somehow strangely, makes them feel better.
Anthony Liccione
#63. On the mountains of memory by the world's wellsprings, in all man's eyes, where the light of life of him is on all past things, death only dies.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
#64. Flesh does strange things to memory. Pain and joy both alter it. When you are happy, you remember things one way. When you are sad, you remember them another. And sometimes the flesh does not admit that memory is real at all or plucks false memories out of thin air.
Tanya Karen Gough
#65. 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
#66. Life may unfold chronologically for the body and for bureaucracies that keep track of such things as births, marriages, deaths, visas, tax returns, expulsions, and identity cards, but memory does not play this game in quite the same way, always manages to confound the desire for tidiness.
Ariel Dorfman
#67. Those who did remember probably shrugged off the chill of her memory, turned their heads down to the sports page or up toward the approaching bus. The world is a terrible place, they thought. Bad things happen every day. My bus is late.
Dennis Lehane
#68. The way real memories work, from what we understand, is really complex. And it's an interconnection of different things and redundancy in the brain. So the idea of a memory existing as a little snow globe - the way we represent it in the film - is actually not scientifically accurate at all.
Pete Docter
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Some things you remember, and some you forget. Of the things you remember, you have to wonder what's real and what's translated into a memory from a story you heard.
Bill Konigsberg
#72. If I should die," said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.
Dan Simmons
#73. 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
#74. Conscious access to memory is a unique trait of living things, but memory itself is not. It's encoded in the minute vibrations between elementary particles. Our entire universe is built of information given shape. Part of that is its history. Its memory.
M.R. Graham
#75. The most vital things in the look of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory; memory of that vital moment.
Robert Henri
#76. 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
#77. It is said that time heals everything. I don't think that's true. As the years have gone by, I've found it odd how simple things can still remind you of those terrible times or how the moment you try so hard to forget becomes your sharpest memory.
Amita Trasi
#78. It is the common experience, after all, that things that are well written are not only read with enjoyment by those who come to them for the first time, but also do not fail to be enjoyed when read again by those who know them and whose memory of them has not faded away.
Augustine Of Hippo
#79. I always try to write from memory, and I always try to use memory as an editor. So when I'm thinking of something like a relationship or whatever, then I'm letting my memory tell me what the important things were.
Jeffrey Brown
#80. My memory of 3D movies is Fernando Lamas in a swashbuckling movie. And I suppose it had been the fifties, in which swords came out at you, bullets came out at you, things were thrown into the auditorium, apparently. All that sort of cheap, "Oh, look at us, we've got 3D" isn't in the film.
Ian McKellen
#81. Silently we went round and round,
And through each hollow mind
The memory of dreadful things
Rushed like a dreadful wind,
And horror stalked before each man,
And terror crept behind.
Oscar Wilde
#82. Should the Egyptians learn to write, Thamus goes on, "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." The
Nicholas Carr
#83. My mom used to say that's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory - hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.
Isaac Marion
#84. The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man's memory. That is our duty. If we don't fulfill it, we feel unhappy.
Jorge Luis Borges
#85. Where hard life makes some maudlin to the point of weeping at mere memory, it grants others a curious immunity to suffering. Like the slaves who work the charcoal pits, their skin grows hardened to the pinch of fire and coals, insensible to burning things.
R. Scott Bakker
#86. Each of us, if we would grow, must be committed to excellence. The championships, the money, the color; all of these things linger only in the memory. It is the spirit, the will to excel, the will to win; these are the things that endure.
Vince Lombardi
#87. Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.
Mark Twain
#88. A good memory is surely a compost heap that converts experience to wisdom, creativity, or dottiness; not that these things are of much earthly value, but at least they may keep you amused when the world is keeping you locked away or shutting you out.
Michael Leunig
#89. Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.
Ali Smith
#90. The colors of living things begin to fade with the last breath, and the soft, springy skin and supple muscle rot within weeks. But the bones sometimes remain, faithful echoes of the shape, to bear some last faint witness to the glory of what was.
Diana Gabaldon
#91. Ome things you don't need to hear in order to hear. The mind has an ear of its own and sometimes memory is the fiercest fucking DJ alive.
David Levithan
#92. I'm very 'spur of the moment'. I'm always trying to think of fun things to do to create a memory.
Josh Hartnett
#93. Memory cannot exist without endurance of the things perceived, and the thing perceived cannot remain where it has never been.
William Harvey
#94. We're defining the competitive landscape ... of who can provide the most supportive services that make life easier, keep track of things, that complement human memory in a way that helps us get things done,
Eric Horvitz
#95. 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
#96. For almost a decade I was haunted by the memory of Deborah Black, I was about to claim. But the memory didn't haunt me; I haunted the memory. Went to it, at night or in the deadened hours of empty afternoons, woke it up, reminded it of all the fun we'd had, made it do things with me.
Glen Duncan
#97. Memory is so crazy! It's like we've got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuff. Meanwhile, all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after the other.
Haruki Murakami
#98. My earliest memory is nursing and struggling to see the colored lights making up the map of the world, the famous backdrop for Larry King's TV show. There's an 'I-want-to-do-all-things-at-once' kind of theme to it.
Ronan Farrow
#99. One of the best things about aging is being able to watch imagination overtake memory.
Harriet Doerr
#100. As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer's because it attacks the two things most central to a writer's craft - language and memory, which together make up an individual's identity. Alzheimer's makes a new character out of a familiar person.
Charlie Pierce
