2,914 Quotes About Memory

We humans are different--our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them. Our recollections change in their retelling.

A sudden ache beset his heart; he had stumbled on just one of those past moments in his life, whose beauty and rapture he had failed to arrest, whose wings had fluttered away into the unknown; he had stumbled on a buried memory, a wild sweet time, swiftly choked and ended.

Perhaps all remembrance is a process of compilation and creation. Every day we absorb what is around us and assemble observations of a specific time: sounds, smells, textures, words, images, and feelings. Of course, we prioritize and edit as we go, subjective witnesses to our own lives, providing recollections that are often biased and incomplete.

The notion that where one is from can be understood using what remains of that place opens up a highly sensitive and rich terrain that can help unpack belonging, especially if that place has now been rendered inaccessible by national borders.

She was our mother and belonged to us. She was never mentioned to anyone because we simply didn't have enough of her to share.

Levade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

जाने कितनी बातें, मुस्कुराहटें समेट लाते थे जहां से,उस पते परअब बस यादें रहती हैं।

Some memories are second skins, scenes we inhabit—seen or unseen—for the duration of our lives.

We keep stuff in order to hang on to what's important, but it's an illusion ... These objects are not bridges to the past, they're bridges to memories of the past. But they are not the past.