633fd24
|
The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.
|
|
loss
memory
|
John Green |
416b0de
|
Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
|
|
time
reality
past
injuries
scars
memory
|
Cormac McCarthy |
d6247b4
|
People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn't.
|
|
humor
recall
memory
|
Christopher Paolini |
4546411
|
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.
|
|
moving-on
memories
future
past
homelessness
belonging
leaving
attachment
uncertainty
roots
home
reminiscence
memory
|
Beryl Markham |
0c2c5b8
|
We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss.
|
|
loss
fear
hope
life
love
the-infernal-devices
jem-carstairs
shadowhunters
memory
|
Cassandra Clare |
9a264f8
|
Remember tonight... for it is the beginning of always
|
|
inspirational
beginnings
memory
|
Dante |
4d18af8
|
Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.
|
|
relationships
memory
|
Haruki Murakami |
e9f0722
|
"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction--they're all just fuel."
|
|
memory
|
Haruki Murakami |
1f85264
|
I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.
|
|
past
love
intimacy
memory
|
Raymond Carver |
b069569
|
The price of a memory, is the memory of the sorrow it brings.
|
|
john-smith
life-experience
memory
|
Pittacus Lore |
d91f3b9
|
Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
|
|
memory
|
Cormac McCarthy |
ab3d79d
|
Scars are just another kind of memory.
|
|
inspirational-quotes
inspirational
scars
memory
|
M.L. Stedman |
c78a487
|
What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?
|
|
marriage
sorrow
relationship
death
sadness
love
fellowship
memory
|
George Eliot |
e033b71
|
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
|
|
recollection
memory
|
William Faulkner |
f8a8dd5
|
Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.
|
|
memory
|
Neil Gaiman |
6bfa73d
|
Remember my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker
|
|
memory
|
Bram Stoker |
30236fc
|
Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn't give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. The scenery was the last thing on my mind.
|
|
memory
|
Haruki Murakami |
9b8a1b1
|
...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.
|
|
pain
memory
pleasure
|
Jane Austen |
a9ed738
|
Memory is the happiness of being alone.
|
|
memory
|
Lois Lowry |
38e03a3
|
Time's the thief of memory
|
|
time
roland-deschain
memory
|
Stephen King |
62239c4
|
O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude...
|
|
poetry
rectitude
minds
invisible
dead
memory
|
George Eliot |
6026335
|
There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.
|
|
truth
falsehood
recollection
memory
|
Harold Pinter |
4ae085b
|
It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' says the White Queen to Alice.
|
|
carroll
memory
|
Lewis Carroll |
1f88d6b
|
Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.
|
|
courage
writing
empowerment
strength
guenter-grass
record-of-life
creative-process
experience
memory
|
Salman Rushdie |
640a893
|
Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.
|
|
persistence
hurts
stephen-king
novels
requirements
talent
misery
remember
scars
writers
memory
stories
|
Stephen King |
217e0ae
|
If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?
|
|
loss
love
jodi-picoult
plain-truth
wish
remember
sad
memory
|
Jodi Picoult |
7c45f29
|
Most have been forgotten. Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best. The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both.
|
|
heroes
loras-tyrell
jaime-lannister
villains
knights
legend
memory
stories
|
George R.R. Martin |
67a1bac
|
I feel as if I had opened a book and found roses of yesterday sweet and fragrant, between its leaves.
|
|
roses
memory
|
L.M. Montgomery |
2394e5e
|
Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.
|
|
memory
|
Marilynne Robinson |
84967ae
|
He looked at the silver pocketknife in his hand. An idea came to him - possibly the stupidest, craziest idea he'd had since he thought, Hey, I'll get Percy to swim in the River Styx! He'll love me for that!
|
|
past
nico-di-angelo
memory
|
Rick Riordan |
6d19b2b
|
How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she'd returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn't they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself. Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together. It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.
|
|
memory
|
Michael Cunningham |
22f78a9
|
"Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, "We *told* you not to tell." But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on."
|
|
memories
writing
advice
getting-started
memoir
remembering
childhood
incest
memory
|
Anne Lamott |
503f538
|
No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.
|
|
words
story
history
humanity
reality
semiotics
truthful
narrative
memory
|
Roger Zelazny |
ffef2ec
|
What needs my for his honoured bones, The labor of an age in piled stones, Or that his hallowed relics should be hid Under a star-y-pointing pyramid? Dear son of memory, great heir of fame, What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?
|
|
shakespeare
poetry
hallowed
pyramid
relics
labor
fame
honour
heir
william-shakespeare
memory
|
John Milton |
8f35981
|
Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.
|
|
memory
psychology
|
H.P. Lovecraft |
c79e963
|
At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.
|
|
words
time
space
perception
memory
|
Isabel Allende |
57058d6
|
People always talk like there's a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn't, at least not for me. I remember what I've imagined and imagine what I remember.
|
|
memory
|
John Green |
15a5aa8
|
Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shift of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.
|
|
worth
pain
love
heartache
hurt
memory
|
Jeanette Winterson |
6c3abcc
|
Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.
|
|
evaporation
memory
weather
|
Haruki Murakami |
0473612
|
You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.
|
|
understanding
remembrance
knowledge
memory
|
Amy Tan |
89276d3
|
Or maybe we'll make a home somewhere inside ourselves, to carry with us wherever we go- which is the way I carry my mother now.
|
|
tris
memory
|
Veronica Roth |
7103769
|
... And the boy whose hair remained the color of lemons forever.
|
|
color
death
lemon
forever
hair
memory
|
Markus Zusak |
603bddd
|
[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
|
|
past
memory
|
Milan Kundera |
bfa7591
|
"[...]my memory is reasonably good--unlike yours, dear sir!" "Mine is erratic," he said imperturbably. "I remember only what interests me."
|
|
memory
|
Georgette Heyer |
acf53b1
|
Then one morning she'd begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn't remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she'd realized again what she'd learned at five when her mother left - that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting the small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she'd worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother's voice, the color of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood. (51)
|
|
grief
sorrow
endure
forgetting
remembering
memory
|
Ron Rash |
edff6c9
|
suffered then, as now he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others... He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds - or on persons devoted to them - have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life. When termed a 'dirty little atheist' he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished. If had ceased his writings with 'The Rights of Man' he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But 'The Age of Reason' cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen - a greater loss to them than to . I was always interested in the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle; the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty. Traducers have said that he spent his last days drinking in pothouses. They have pictured him as a wicked old man coming to a sorry end. But I am persuaded that must have looked with magnanimity and sorrow on the attacks of his countrymen. That those attacks have continued down to our day, with scarcely any abatement, is an indication of how strong prejudice, when once aroused, may become. It has been a custom in some quarters to hold up as an example of everything bad. The memory of will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty - who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause - can be permanently obscured by such attacks. should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands. { }
|
|
prejudice
draught-burner
hollow-candle
iron-bridge
teddy-roosevelt
inventor
misrepresentation
roosevelt
theodore-roosevelt
greatness
paine
thomas-paine
atheist
memory
|
Thomas A. Edison |
2246a07
|
Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.
|
|
woman
memory
|
Ann Patchett |
ef4a23c
|
He remembered Apollo, smiling and tanned and completely cool in his shades. Thalia had said, He's hot. He's the sun god, Percy replied. That's not what I meant. Why was Nico thinking about that now? The random memory irritated him, made him feel jittery.
|
|
nico-di-angelo
memory
|
Rick Riordan |
e745040
|
The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
|
|
time
speed
memory
|
Milan Kundera |
0c1fe0b
|
And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.
|
|
wonder
wisdom
memory
|
Terry Pratchett |
a70ccd9
|
We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
|
|
mourning
grief
loss
immortality
sorrow
death
life-goes-on
memory
|
John Banville |
28e66c4
|
Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.
|
|
time
history
meaning
life
philosophy
rest
memory
|
Julian Barnes |
d0dc707
|
Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.
|
|
blood-and-gold
vampire-chronicles
thorne
curse
gift
remembering
memory
vampires
|
Anne Rice |
5df35db
|
How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement.
|
|
loss
growing-up
memory
|
J.K. Rowling |
160f7f5
|
"What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?' 'History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly. 'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. ... 'Finn?' '"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." (quoting Patrick Lagrange)"
|
|
history
politics
triumphalism
victors
imperialism
memory
|
Julian Barnes |
1468321
|
Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.
|
|
time
memory
|
Marcel Proust |
98cb8ac
|
A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.
|
|
writer
writing
vision
jack-kerouac
memory
|
Jack Kerouac |
1215276
|
Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water.
|
|
reality
remember
memory
|
Sherwood Smith |
059a179
|
one of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.
|
|
loss
happiness
love
time-traveling
childhood-memory
mother
memory
|
Audrey Niffenegger |
24281c1
|
I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer -- and what trees and seasons smelled like -- how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.
|
|
time
plants
landscape
memory
|
John Steinbeck |
b88cd8d
|
Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.
|
|
poverty
work
knowledge
memory
|
George Eliot |
2fb1d2f
|
In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.
|
|
reality
compromise
self-pity
remorse
regret
memory
|
Julian Barnes |
e43b6f1
|
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.
|
|
past
regret
memory
|
Michel Faber |
2604489
|
Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme, But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn And broils roots out the work of masonry, Nor mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory. 'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So, till judgement that yourself arise, You in this, and dwell in lovers eyes.
|
|
sonnet-55
monuments
fame
remembrance
posterity
memory
|
William Shakespeare |
5916a4d
|
I sit quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memories standing out.
|
|
loss
happiness
love
mother
memory
|
Audrey Niffenegger |
b65bfea
|
He remembered how nice the kids at Camp Half-Blood had been to him after the war with Kronos. Great job, Nico! Thanks for bringing the armies of the Underworld to save us! Everybody smiled. They all invited him to sit at their table. After about a week, his welcome wore thin. Campers would jump when he walked up behind them. He would emerge from the shadows at the campfire, startle somebody and see the discomfort in their eyes: Are you still here? Why are you here? It didn't help that immediately after the war with Kronos, Annabeth and Percy had started dating ... Nico set down his fartura. Suddenly it didn't taste so good.
|
|
past
heartbreak
life
love
nico-di-angelo
memory
|
Rick Riordan |
6f04588
|
I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she's gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.
|
|
memory
nostalgia
|
Haruki Murakami |
2650662
|
Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You've crossed through nothingness or dream to another island in Time.
|
|
sleep
sanity
time
inspirational
rest
memory
|
Roger Zelazny |
1701523
|
The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock.
|
|
pain
compulsion
anguish
compulsive
hopeless
obsession
unrequited-love
memory
|
Donna Tartt |
b1f5bb5
|
Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but I could not find that castle today, nor tell you the color of that woman's hair. Who knighted me, old friend? What were my favorite foods? It all fades. Sometimes I think I was born on the bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of fire in my mouth and a hole in my chest. Are you my mother, Thoros?
|
|
beric-dondarrion
hole
thoros
knight
fire
blood
memory
trauma
|
George R.R. Martin |
3d96c6b
|
What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember , the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.
|
|
marriage
memories
memory
nostalgia
|
Richard Ford |
6af17ee
|
Memory is the basis of every journey.
|
|
stephen-king
journey
memory
|
Stephen King |
01f22a7
|
I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.... Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
|
|
memory
|
Vladimir Nabokov |
093844f
|
Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.
|
|
faith
life
memory
|
Markus Zusak |
17fb947
|
And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.
|
|
girl
memory
|
Marcel Proust |
c7d0afc
|
"Hold childhood in reverence, and do not be in any hurry to judge it for good or ill. Leave exceptional cases to show themselves, let their qualities be tested and confirmed, before special methods are adopted. Give nature time to work before you take over her business, lest you interfere with her dealings. You assert that you know the value of time and are afraid to waste it. You fail to perceive that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all. You are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. What! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long. Plato, in his Republic, which is considered so stern, teaches the children only through festivals, games, songs, and amusements. It seems as if he had accomplished his purpose when he had taught them to be happy; and Seneca, speaking of the Roman lads in olden days, says, "They were always on their feet, they were never taught anything which kept them sitting." Were they any the worse for it in manhood? Do not be afraid, therefore, of this so-called idleness. What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life? You would say, "He is mad; he is not enjoying his life, he is robbing himself of part of it; to avoid sleep he is hastening his death." Remember that these two cases are alike, and that childhood is the sleep of reason. The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin. You fail to see that this very facility proves that they are not learning. Their shining, polished brain reflects, as in a mirror, the things you show them, but nothing sinks in. The child remembers the words and the ideas are reflected back; his hearers understand them, but to him they are meaningless. Although memory and reason are wholly different faculties, the one does not really develop apart from the other. Before the age of reason the child receives images, not ideas; and there is this difference between them: images are merely the pictures of external objects, while ideas are notions about those objects determined by their relations." --
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reason
memory
|
Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
76b84d0
|
She knew with suddeness and ease that this moment would be with her always, within hand's reach of memory. She doubted if they all sensed it - they had seen the world - but even George was silent for a minute as they looked, and the scene, the smell, even the sound of the band playing a faintly recognisable movie theme, was locked forever in her, and she was at peace.
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|
memory
nostalgia
|
Stephen King |
45820e4
|
The undead did not love, but they remembered love with a savage loyalty.
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|
undead
memory
|
Kim Harrison |
b6ad4d5
|
" was a great man. a wonderful intellect, a great soul of matchless courage, one of the great men of the earth -- and yet we have no right to bow down to his memory simply because he was great. Great orators, great soldiers, great lawyers, often use their gifts for a most unholy cause. We meet to pay a tribute of love and respect to because he used his matchless power for the good of man.
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|
good
courage
goodness
love
ingersoll
robert-g-ingersoll
robert-green-ingersoll
robert-ingersoll
eulogy
praise
greatness
tribute
respect
honor
power
memory
|
Clarence Darrow |
08f6747
|
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.
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|
myth
personal
memory
|
Neil Gaiman |
9885a9b
|
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.
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|
grudges
savant-syndrome
forgiveness
memory
|
Christopher Hitchens |
95e9281
|
That brief walk was one of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering. [p214]
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|
recollection
memory
|
John Green |
9b51f3c
|
Just for the record, the weather today is increasing turmoil with a possible physical and emotional breakdown.
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|
shame
memory
|
Chuck Palahniuk |
182f6d1
|
He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.
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forgetting
moment
memory
|
Graham Greene |
cd04e9d
|
Piper: it looks like we have hole. Percy: Yeah we've got a dam hole! (LOL-ing) Piper: What! Percy: Inside joke. (still LOL-ing) Piper: Whatever.
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|
humor
thalia-grace
percy-jackson
memory
|
Rick Riordan |
d0a13e1
|
Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.
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|
memory
|
Neil Gaiman |
65482d5
|
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
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|
metaphor
mothers
memory
|
Vladimir Nabokov |
24f4637
|
Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.
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|
memory-loss
memory
|
Jeanette Winterson |
c6babb9
|
We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed. Even the most voluminous archives cannot help.
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memory
|
Milan Kundera |
6929cbf
|
Remember the botched brothel-visit in L'Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
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happiness
life
memory
pleasure
|
Julian Barnes |
8bda5a8
|
What business does memory have with time?
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|
time
memory
|
Jess Walter |
4193ac9
|
You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.
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memory
|
Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
b0d49c9
|
The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.
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|
metaphor
humor
recollection
memory
|
Terry Pratchett |
79d71e3
|
And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was a memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. Cut off from everything that was familiar to him, unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him him nowhere but into himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. Far from troubling him, this state of being lost because a source of happiness, of exhilaration. He breathed it into his very bones. As if on the brink of some previously hidden knowledge, he breathed it into his very bones and said to himself, almost triumphantly: I am lost.
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|
lost
memory
|
Paul Auster |
09f1d20
|
Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.
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|
formative-years
development
maturity
memory
|
Kim Stanley Robinson |
211b44e
|
The past informs the present. Memory makes the map we carry, no matter how hard we try to erase it.
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|
past
present-moment
memory
|
Cara Black |
867bbee
|
Better to leave him with the memory of their being a pair of monsters, wrapped in each other's arms.
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|
love
monster
vampire
memory
|
Holly Black |
6afc3db
|
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.
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|
life
memory
|
Diana Gabaldon |
99f77be
|
When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.
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|
youth
past
memory
|
Aimee Bender |
b62c0cd
|
You may forget the one with whom you have laughed, but never the one with whom you have wept.
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|
laughter
rememberance
weeping
memory
|
Kahlil Gibran |
f71452c
|
Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?
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|
memories
writing
memory
nostalgia
|
Haruki Murakami |
0561637
|
Happiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go on and on ambushing you, presumably until you die.
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|
memory
|
M. John Harrison |
508a647
|
It is anticipation and recollection that fill the heart--never the sensation of the moment.
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memory
|
Roger Zelazny |
05969a6
|
When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light.
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|
marriage
love
truth
memory
|
Ian McEwan |
b766eba
|
Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.
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|
memory
|
Michel de Montaigne |
ba57e7f
|
That was seven years ago. The doctors told her father the memory would fade, like the big messy scar on her arm, but neither ever did.
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|
scars
faded-memory
monstrous
tana-s-mother
paranormal-romance
tana-bach
holly-black
the-coldest-girl-in-coldtown
memory
|
Holly Black |
eff8088
|
Only two weeks since he had left, and it was already happening. Time, blunting the edges of those sharp memories. Laila bore down mentally. What had he said? It seemed vital, suddenly, that she know. Laila closed her eyes. Concentrated. With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when Laila would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by Tariq's name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion--like the phantom pain of an amputee. Except every once in a long while, when Laila was a grown woman, ironing a shirt or pushing her children on a swing set, something trivial, maybe the warmth of a carpet beneath her feet on a hot day or the curve of a stranger's forehead, would set off a memory of that afternoon together. And it would come rushing back. The spontaneity of it. Their astonishing imprudence... It would flood her, steal her breath. But then it would pass. The moment would pass. Leave her feeling deflated, feeling noting but a vague restlessness.
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|
memory
|
Khaled Hosseini |
ab112d8
|
Nay! Alas for us all! And for all that walk in the world in these after-days. For such is the way of it: to find and lose, as it seems to those whose boat is on the running stream. But I count you blessed [...] for your loss you suffer of your own free will, and you might have chosen otherwise. But you have not forsaken your companions, and the least reward that you shall have is that the memory of Lothlorien shall remain ever clear and unstained in your heart, and shall neither fade nor grow stale.
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|
memories
loyalty
memory
|
J.R.R. Tolkien |
f9bd6ad
|
Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance.
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|
past
memory
|
Paul Auster |
2e71063
|
Here's to many more firsts and many more great memories.
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|
memory
|
Christine Feehan |
8a5a165
|
Now, women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.
|
|
hurston
men-and-women
memory
|
Zora Neale Hurston |
04d01f6
|
In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure...
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|
pain
memories
faith
hope
grace-and-favor
grace
creator
artist
memory
creation
|
Madeleine L'Engle |
2f9ec4d
|
And Will knew what it was to see his daemon. As she flew down to the sand, he felt his heart tighten and release in a way he never forgot. Sixty years and more would go by, and as an old man he would still feel some sensations as bright and fresh as ever: Lyra's fingers putting the fruit between his lips under the gold-and-silver trees; her warm mouth pressing against his; his daemon being torn from his unsuspecting breast as they entered the world of the dead; and the sweet rightfulness of her coming back to him at the edge of the moonlight dunes.
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memory
|
Philip Pullman |
64bc71f
|
I sit alone in a dead world. The wind blows hot and dry, and the dust gathers like particles of memory waiting to be swept away. I pray for forgetfulness, yet my memory remains strong, as does the outstretched arm of the oppressive air. It seems as if the wind has been there since the beginning of the nightmare. Sometimes loud and harsh, a thousand sharp needles scratching at my reddened skin. Sometimes a whisper, a curious sigh in the black of night, of words more frightening than pain. I know now the wind has been speaking to me. Only I couldn't understand because I was too scared. I am scared now as I write these words. Still, there is nothing else to do.
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|
world
fear
whispers
wind
needles
forgetfulness
dead
nightmare
memory
|
Christopher Pike |
ed93642
|
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us of time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
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|
time
memory
|
Julian Barnes |
9b20e84
|
"Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory."
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memory
|
John Irving |
40c8506
|
It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
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|
madness
heroes
strength
innocence
memory
|
James Baldwin |
420cacc
|
I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room
|
|
loss
happiness
love
mother
memory
|
Audrey Niffenegger |
e0e0102
|
I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.
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|
wisdom
time-being
memory
|
Ruth Ozeki |
7c6b918
|
ah km hy `nyd@ ldhkr@ wdhkrty l ttrkny bslm , tml' mkhylty bSwr , bklmt , b'lm wHb
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|
novel
memory
|
Isabel Allende |
54b52b8
|
I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.
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|
forgotten
remembering
memory
|
John Green |
0ef0e7e
|
Sometimes you want to remember. And sometimes you need to forget.
|
|
quote
the-day-before
quotes
memory
|
Lisa Schroeder |
9ed21e7
|
Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterwards recalled to his mind's eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory.
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|
woman
memory
|
Thomas Hardy |
24c313d
|
Was memory always as much of a burden as it could sometimes be a blessing.
|
|
burden
memory
|
Mary Balogh |
75dc5da
|
If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.
|
|
the-past
memory
|
Julian Barnes |
7964300
|
Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.
|
|
past
life
parents-and-children
memory
|
Julian Barnes |
124b1c3
|
I'll remember you... I remember everyone I've lost.
|
|
grief
loss
love
photo-album
photograph
think
noir
remember
sad
memory
nostalgia
|
Rebecca McNutt |
8fdf3b6
|
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.
|
|
memories
things
memory
|
Orhan Pamuk |
dfbc4cb
|
She knew that she had a tendency to allow her mind to wander, but surely that's what made the world interesting. One thought led to another, one memory triggered another. How dull it would be, she thought, not to be reminded of the interconnectedness of everything, how dull for the present not to evoke the past, for here not to imply there.
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|
interconnectedness
daydreaming
memory
|
Alexander McCall Smith |
99e1f0f
|
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.
|
|
memories
past
melancholy
oblivion
remembering
memory
|
Lois Lowry |
e7a2a2a
|
People's lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and... well, sometimes they can't talk about them.
|
|
truth
strange
memory
stories
|
Alan Moore |
4baeee0
|
human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions
|
|
writers
memory
|
Salman Rushdie |
4ab6f3f
|
You, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon--
|
|
love
unattainable
idea
memory
|
Ayn Rand |
6f013b4
|
Well, a man's mind can't stay in time the way his body does.
|
|
time
mind
memory
|
John Steinbeck |
d88c5cd
|
I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.
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|
memory
|
P.D. James |
a4f2661
|
The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.
|
|
mind
mind-games
memory
|
Gregory Maguire |
0a6fd04
|
Memory is the enemy of wonder
|
|
present
wonder
memory
|
Michael Pollan |
888171d
|
Except heaven is a hope , and eden is a memory .
|
|
heaven
hope
memory
|
Craig Thompson |
6cafa38
|
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.
|
|
memory-trigger
metafiction
self
french
infinite
novel
memory
nostalgia
|
Marcel Proust |
b56366d
|
Education is everywhere, prompting one to think, to consider, to remember.
|
|
memory
|
Louis L'Amour |
e75ebcd
|
Humility is as good for the soul as it is for the memory
|
|
humility
lessons-learned
memory
|
Patricia C. Wrede |
049760d
|
And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building. I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I - in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves - who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.
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|
hypersensitivity
no-skin
despair
soul
memory
|
Fernando Pessoa |
b840639
|
Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.
|
|
memory
|
Ray Bradbury |
73e988a
|
It's all right, Ginny. It's over. It's just a memory.
|
|
memory
|
J.K. Rowling |