2,914 Quotes About Memory

We should kill our pasts with each passing day. Blot them out, so that they will not hurt. Each present day could thus be endured more easily, it would not be measured against what no longer exists. As things are, spectres mix with our lives so that there is neither pure memory nor pure life. They clash and try to strangle each other, continually

Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

La nostra identità non è fatta solo delle cose che ricordiamo, ma anche di ciò che riusciamo a dimenticare.

So - people a thousand years from now...This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

He who travels much has this advantage over others – that the things he remembers soon become remote, so that in a short time they acquire the vague and poetical quality which is only given to other things by time. He who has not traveled at all has this disadvantage – that all his memories are of things present somewhere, since the places with which all his memories are concerned are present.

When the road stretches long and dark and ragged, it’s sweetness that remains at the end of it.

Where would we be without it, memory? Well, it'll never die here. Never in this country. We feed it too well.

Maybe to have a memory you need time for reflection, however brief, just to let the memory find a place to settle.