2,914 Quotes About Memory

I think that everything that happens to you stays in you, even if it stays in a part of your mind where you can't find it. That's why you should never try to forget when people urge you to.

We cannot forget those we love. They shape our lives for ever, by their absence as much as by their presence.

As her photo burned, I thought: even oblivion is a kindness.

A hard red knot glues itself to my ribs like indigestion, the tangled-up knot of all the things I've loved that will be buried one day, all the things I know I am bound to forget.

The light wraps you in its mortal flame.Abstracted pale mourner, standing that wayAgainst the old propellers of the twilight That revolves around you.Speechless, my friend,Alone in the loneliness of this hour of the deadAnd filled with the lives of fire,Pure heir of the ruined day.

Forgetting! It is a form of suicide, a renunciation of the only good the we truly and ineluctably possess: the past. For if joys alone were forgotten, perhaps oblivion would be justly desired. But we are proud and jealous of our sorrows, we love them, we want to remember them. It is they that comprise the crown of life.

What went wrong? That is the question, and not "To be or not to be," for all of Shakespeare.

I have these two different images of her etched into my memory: one as this idealized mother, and the other as a sort of pressure weighing down on me - obsessive, feminine love.

We humans are like squirrels who spend all summer gathering and hoarding nuts and when winter comes can't remember where they are.