2,914 Quotes About Memory

Each memory was now the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. The only thing that remained tangible to him was the sense of absence.

A memory is never as good as a moment.

What are any of our lives but the shapes we force them into. Memory doesn't come to us of its own; we go after it, pull it into sunlight and make of it what we need, what we're driven towards, what we imagine, changing the world again and again with each new quarry, each descent, each morning.

Sei agora o que nunca soube – que o amor encontra o seu estado mais puro quando julgamos que o fim chegou; finalmente entendo que o amor pode ser precisamente essa ausência, o deixar de estar, ser capaz de apreciar cada minuto da nossa memória como se segurássemos, entre as mãos, um punhado de brasas num deserto de gelo.

The enchantments of the past must always become the disenchantments of the future. But memory, a preservative, may intervene. The embalmer of original enchantments, it is the only human faculty that can outwit the advance of chronological time. Art, the embalmer of memory, is the only human vocation in which the time regained by memory can be permanently fixed.

She couldn't put into words how desparately she wanted to know what had happened to Sarah. But she'd suddenly realized that Sarah was not the only one who had lost her memory of what happened when she was a little girl. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their memories of what had happened to them ...

Time thins the cloth of memory. As the ages pass, its rich colors fade. Strong wool is beaten by the elements until the pattern of its lesson disintegrates, leaving holes in the truth it was meant to carry on. Even the stains of blood bend and bleed, leaving but faded blotches without meaning, mere shadows of lessons that came before, their warnings lost within the obscure impression that remains.

Sentiments, as I have found, can be harvested from places where our memories are fondest.

The beauty of today may not be realised until it becomes tomorrow’s memory