2,914 Quotes About Memory

She has only a ghostplay on some frayed screen of memory, which she takes to be the present.

I have a bad memory. Every day seems new to me.

The past is rarely ever truly behind us. It lives on because we refuse to live unmoored from the world we know and the trusted (or reviled) voices of our forbearers. The prerogatives and passions of our predecessors has left us with a landscape changed and molded to what they perceived to be important and worthy of commemoration. This is as it should be. The tragedy of forgetting is that when our memories fade, we lose our connections to that which we love and value.

Memory is like a wayward dog. Sometimes it drops the ball and sometimes it brings it, and sometimes it doesn’t bring a ball at all; it brings a shoe.

One's first memories are often vicarious: one is told that one did something or was involved in something; one dramatizes it and folds the image falsely into the annals of the truly remembered.

Or poking through a house, in closets shut for years,Full of the scent of time - acrid, musky, dank,One comes, perhaps, upon a flask of memoriesIn whose escaping scent a soul returns to life.- The Flask

Memory is the art of forgetting.

For what, after all, is the difference between a memory and a fantasy? Are not both a succession of imprecisely rendered images further obscured by imprecisely chosen words and animated only by the wistful effort of one's imagination? And who is to say that a vividly imagined moment of happiness is not, in the end, more enriching to the spirit than a hazy semi-recollection of some pallid pastime?

He was, and then he wasn't. One moment his body was the locus of his personhood, the next moment our memories had to pick up the slack.