5,121 Quotes About Memories

She'd be dead before the memories and pain were finally gone; she knew it, accepted it, and dealt with it.

The future was becoming past, everything vanished into the void, and reaching back to grasp for something, one came out clutching - what? A bit of string, scraps of cloth, shadows of the golden time. If one could only reverse it, turn the past into future, and catch it on the wing, on its journey across the always shifting line of the present ...

As I enlarged my vision to see the bigger picture of my dad’s full life, I was better able to let go of being stuck in memories of its end.

Childhood memories surge back more vividly midway through life – like some palimpsest whose original text suddenly reappears after the manuscript has been chemically treated.

Was that the point of suffering: to understand, in some way, what you still had? To clarify it, to rip the stars from the sky and hold them in the hand like diamonds‒to darken all the rest but the most glittering, glad memories? Was that the way to live a sunny life?

Oh well, memories, said I. Yes, even remembering in itself is sad, yet how much more its object! Don't let yourself in for things like that, it's not for you and not for me. It only weakens one's present position without strengthening the former one - nothing is more obvious - quite apart from the fact that the former one doesn't need strengthening.

As if I hadn't spent a lifetime pretending to forget.

Do you think it’s funny that both of our favorite memories are about the people we like the least now?” I ask.“Maybe that’s why we dislike them,” she says. “The distance between who they were and who they are is so wide, we have no hope of getting them back.

My own heart is in my characters. My novels are my memories; they are the best part of me.