“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.”
— Kazuo Ishiguro
“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”
— Guy de Maupassant
“Forbidden to remember, terrified to forget; it was a hard line to walk.”
— Stephenie Meyer
“A man does not know how he came by the half a pie he is holding in his hand!”
— Dylan Moran
“Your words crossed a threshold,And entered the past,Yet they have created,A word that will last.”
— Somya Kedia
“Experiences that we remember intrusively, despite desperately wanting to banish them from our minds, are closely linked to, and sometimes threaten, our perceptions of who we are and who we would like to be.”
— Daniel L. Schacter
“Memory is dynamic, it’s alive.”
— Ari Folman
“Perhaps my sense of reality is not very highly developed, perhaps I lack a sound and reassuring instinct for the solid facts of our earthly existence; I can’t always tell memories from dreams, and often I mistake dreams, coming to life again in colours, smells, sudden associations, with the eerie secret certainty of a past life from which time and space divide me no differently and no better than a light sleep in the early hours.”
— Annemarie Schwarzenbach
“To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the maintenance of this chain which produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist. But something can happen to sever that chain and we are at a loss. What is real? Is reality on this side of the break in the chain? Or over there, on the other side?”
— Haruki Murakami
“The memories: they are the reality.”
— Stephen King
“The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.”
— Eugène Ionesco
“Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it’s noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.”
— Margaret Atwood
“Memory has strange power keeps full data of the past.”
— Kishore Bansal
“That must be what power does to a man: erases what he knows and makes him remember only what services him at the moment.”
— Trish Mercer
“The human mind was a devious organ, however, and it chiseled in stone that which would be best left unrecalled.”
— Raymond L. Atkins
“You can never know what it is that you have forgotten.”
— Upasana Saraf
“How the mind works, by what strange paths it pursues memory.”
— Lance Weller
“There is a difference between being remembered and being caught by the mesh of one’s mind.”
— Yiyun Li
“remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough you can remember anything, whether it really happened or not.”
— Rodman Philbrick
“But who cares? Memory isn’t about reality, and neither is music. It’s about the comforting reflections we want to hold on to, even if they’re mostly bullshit.”
— Spitznagel
“He had a clear, lyrical voice and his songs remained in her ears long after the music had ended.”
— Hiroko Sherwin
“We take gingko to sharpen our memories. We could be memorizing song lyrics instead.”
— Joan Oliver Goldsmith
“Every life has a sound”
— Jodi Picoult
“Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
“My youth is like a scab: under it there is a wound that every day leaks blood. It disfigures me.”
— Gottfried Benn
“But the memories that hang heaviest are the easiest to recall.”
— Julie Gregory
“You always know more than you think you know without being aware of it. You always remember best what has hurt most.Memory is a reflex of the pain. Knowledge is the memory of the pain combined with the unconsciousness which we ‘rationalize’ via dreams or by means of reading literature. It is impossible to learn from someone else’s experience unless we don’t assume this experience as our own’s, which we can achieve only by living it anew and from scratch. We can not live our lives at someone else’s expense. Only life fraught with dangers and risks and lived as your own’s deserves its name. Only selfish people do not live their lives as if they do not belong entirely to them. Cowardice equals a life that you refuse to live at its fullest and at its most dangerous.”
— Martin Walser
“Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.”
— Rohinton Mistry
“My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it’s operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance–this is why people tell me secrets–my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is ever lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound.”
— Dave Eggers
“I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.”
— Janet Fitch