2,914 Quotes About Memory

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

The day that I left my home, I had prayed that my children would forget me. I wanted to spare them the pain of remembering. But that night, as I crouched in the white mist, waiting, I knew more than anything that I wanted them to remember, I wanted desperately to go on living in someone's memory. If we are not remembered, we are more than dead, for it is as if we had never lived.

Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.

Love is motion Potter love is forward movement but you said yourself the memory reel backward it's all backward with you. You are stuck back there because Potter you don't let yourself move forward your eyes get stuck on things and people.

My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.

Memory is not only unruly, leaving us in the lurch when most needed, but stupid as well, putting its nose into places where it is not wanted.

This is the worst of our ways of remembering--this tendency to prod the crust of anecdote in the hope of releasing a gush of piping-hot symbolism.

Erinnerungen sind aus wundersamen Stoff gemacht – trügerisch und dennoch zwingend, mächtig und schattenhaft. Es ist kein Verlaß auf die Erinnerung, und dennoch gibt es keine Wirklichkeit außer der, die wir im Gedächtnis tragen.

Lieux de memoire . . . 'exist because there are no longer any milieux de memoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.' And what are lieux de memoire? [They] are . . . vestiges . . . the rituals of a ritual-less society.