2,914 Quotes About Memory

And of all the rooms in my childhood,God was the largestand most empty.

It is hard to remember.”“Remember what?”“All that goes into the making of any one moment we live. There are things one must try to remember. Do you know what is the hardest thing to remember?”“No,” Adam said.“Well, I’ll tell you, my son,” Aaron Blaustein said. “The hardest thing to remember is that other men are men.” He leaned to set his cup down. “But that,” he said, “is the only way you can be a man yourself. Can be anything.

These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.

We may deny the truth of our childhoods while we are living them, but we one day realize the truth of our parents as readily as we do that of Santa. Neither are as perfect as our memories would have them…

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end grows near, each moment becomes more and more valuable and there is no time to waste on recollection. It's important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia, that it is most powerful in early youth , when the volume of life that has passed is quite small.

If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - than my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.

We need falsifications to make the past inhabitable.

More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened."[As quoted in: In the land of memory: Kazuo Ishiguro remembers when (Adam Dunn, cnn.com Book News, Oct. 27, 2000)]

what it is is the memory of a dance a song you heard long ago to hear it is to be young again and for once for once you are happy