Memory Quotes

History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be.

The harvest of old age is the recollection and abundance of blessing previously secured.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.

It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.

We can invent only with memory.

There's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year.

The old folk, time's doting chronicles.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time... I think I've forgotten this before.

The biggest thing in today's sorrow is the memory of yesterday's joy.

Favorite People, Favorite Places,Favorite Memories of the past ...These are the joys of a lifetimeThose are the things that last

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?

In our time together, you claimed a special place in my heart, one I'll carry with me forever and that no one can ever replace.

No doubt you are right... there would be far less suffering amongst mankind if men... did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity.

Love, however, is very materially assisted by a warm and active imagination: which has a long memory, and will thrive, for a considerable time, on very slight and sparing food.

It does not to dwell on dreams and forget to live, but it is equally foolish to ignore the past – never forget.

People come, people go – they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

On a day of burial there is no perspective--for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was--to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.

We were both young when I first saw you. I close my eyes and the flashback starts. I'm standin' there on a balcony in summer air.

Those who, in debate, appeal to their qualifications, argue from memory, not from understanding.

Along the journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost every vocation is chosen and entered upon as a means to a purpose but is ultimately continued as a final purpose in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent stupidity in which we indulge ourselves.

History: a collection of epitaphs.

He may live in my memory as the most amiable man of my acquaintance.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

Why was I with her? She reminds me of you. In fact, she reminds me more of you than you do!

Gossip is only the lack of a worthy memory.

But the words she spoke of Mrs Harris, lambs could not forgive ... nor worms forget.

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.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

Anyone who invokes authors in discussion is not using his intelligence but his memory.

As my father [Javāharlāl Nehrū] said, you have to keep an open mind, but you have to pour something into it - otherwise ideas slip away like sand between your fingers.

Always tell the truth; then you don't have to remember anything

I still close my eyes and go home - I can always draw from that.

And if, in some distant place in the future, we see each other in our new lives, I will smile at you with joy, and remember how we spent a summer beneath the trees, learning from each other and growing in love.

It is extraordinary how music sends one back into memories of the past.

People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory.

Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart In that vanished abode there far apart

All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.

Immortality is the best recollection one leaves.

I think of you, I dream of you, I conjure you up when I need you most. This is all I can do, but to me it isn't enough. It will never be enough, this I know; yet what else is there for me to do? If you were here, you would tell me, but I have been cheated of even that. You always knew the proper words to ease the pain I felt. You always knew how to make me feel good inside.

Pleasant is the recollection of dangers past.

I had amnesia once or twice.

I must say that though other days may not be so bright, as we look toward the future, that the brightest days will continue to be those we spent with you here in Ireland.

I love the nostalgic myself. I hope we never lose some of the things of the past.

not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo, The hundred & fifty are dumb yet at Alamo.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

A man who pays his bills on time is soon forgotten.

deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone.

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war...war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.

The things which the child loves remain in the domain of the heart until old age. The most beautiful thing in life is that our souls remain hovering over the places where we once enjoyed ourselves. I am one of those who remembers those places regardless of distance or time.

Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.