2,914 Quotes About Memory

Memories make you sentimental, experiences make you smart.

The most important things, the experiences that leave marks on our souls for everyone to see, those marks that reflect our most intense emotions in a glass pane, we will never forget.

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

Imagine being just strong enough to remember what life was like, feeling things, your heartbeat, the world around you. And imagine you couldn’t have it anymore, couldn’t even properly remember it, but there was just enough that some deep part of you knew what you were missing. Wouldn’t you do anything to get it back, if it was right there for the taking? Wouldn’t you be willing to kill for it?

We enshrine things to memory very differently than we experience them in real time. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a couple of terms to make the distinction. He talks about the "experiencing self" versus the "remembering self.

And if that's the case -- if we are our remembering selves -- then it matters far less how we feel moment to moment with our children. They play rich and crucial roles in our life stories, generating both outsize highs and outsize lows. Without such complexity, we don't feel like we've amounted to much. "You don't have a good story until something deviates from the expected," says McAdams. "And raising children leads to some pretty unexpected happenings.

You know the saying a rolling stone gathers no moss? I'm the opposite. I've gathered too much, and when one thing happens, it brings up everything else that's ever been similar to it. I don't just feel things once and then move on. I fell them over and over again, and the only new thing is whatever precipitated the memory of the old, so it never really feels new at all. Everything just gets integrated into one big giant ball...

I am the night windHe is the moonbeam Together we create a mystical beauty that to the rest of the world remains unseen

You are the moonI am the skyOur love... the universeWithin it we liveWithout it we die