Memory

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• Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.
  • Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

• Reg, as he insisted on being called, had a memory that he himself had once compared to the Queen Alexandra Birdwing Butterfly in that it was colorful, flitted prettily hither and thither, and was now, alas, almost completely extinct.
  • Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

• Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.
  • Sholem Asch, The Nazarene

• To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward.
  • Margaret Fairless Barber, The Roadmender

• God gave us memories that we might have roses in December.
  • J. M. Barrie,Courage (1922)

• Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid.
  • Ugo Betti, Goat Island

• I am a miser of my memories of you
  And will not spend them.
  • Witter Bynner, Coins

• A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.
  • Hortense Calisher, Queenie (1971)

• To live in hearts we leave behind
  Is not to die.
  • Thomas Campbell, Hallowed Ground

• Memory is the thing you forget with.
  • Alexander Chase,Perspectives

• The sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that had left the conscious mind.
  • Thalassa Cruso, To Everything There is a Season (1973)

• One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
  One need not be a house;
  The brain has corridors surpassing
  Material place.
  • Emily Dickinson, Time and Eternity

• We have all forgot more than we remember.
  • Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia

• Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things.
  • Pierce Harris, Atlanta Journal

• The faintest waft is sometimes enough to induce feelings of hunger or anticipation, or to transport you back through time and space to a long-forgotten moment in your childhood. It can overwhelm you in an instant or simply tease you, creeping into your consciousness slowly and evaporating almost the moment it is detected.
  • Stephen Lacey, Scent in Your Garden (1991)

• Certainly it is one of the most blessed things about "the faith that is in Christ Jesus," that it makes a man remember his own sinfulness with penitence, not with pain — that it makes the memory of past transgressions full of solemn joy, because the memory of past transgressions but brings to mind the depth and rushing fullness of that river of love which has swept them all away as far as the east is from the west. Oh, my brother, you cannot forget your sins; but it lies within your own decision whether the remembrance shall be thankfulness and blessedness, or whether it shall be pain and loss forever.
  • Alexander Maclaren, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 408.

• My friend, picture to yourself this — a human spirit shut up with the companionship of its forgotten and dead transgressions! There is a resurrection of acts as well as of bodies. Think what it will be for a man to sit surrounded by that ghastly company, the ghosts of his own sins! and as each forgotten fault and buried badness comes, silent and sheeted, into that awful society, and sits itself down there, think of him greeting each with the question, "Thou too? What! are ye all here? Hast tl1ou found me, O mine enemy?" and from each bloodless, spectral lip there tolls out the answer, the knell of his life," I have found thee, because thou hast sold thyself to work evil in the sight of the Lord."
  • Alexander Maclaren, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 408.

• ... and what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions until all you can remember is a name.
  • Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City

• A strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgement.
  • Montaigne, Essays

• What thousands and millions of recollections there must be in us! And every now and then one of them becomes known to us; and it shows us what spiritual depths are growing in us, what mines of memory.
  • William Mountford, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 407.

• Women and elephants never forget.
  • Dorothy Parker, Ballads of Unfortunate Animals

• We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
  • Cesare Paverse, The Burning Brand

• If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
  • Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

• The pure memories given
  To help our joy on earth, when earth is past,
  Shall help our joy in heaven.
  • Margaret J. Preston, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 407.

• Memory itself is an internal rumour.
  • George Santayana, The Life of Reason

• I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done.
  • Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (1936)

• What isn't remembered never happened. Memory is merely a record. You just need to re-write that record.
  • Serial Experiments Lain, Japanese writing in final episode

• Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
  • George Bernard Shaw, The Irrational Knot

• A man's real possesion is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.
  • Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

• Memories are very precious to people's lives. They give us the opportunity to prove to ourselves that we exist, and if we lose them, we have an unrelenting fear of uncertainty. You must listen to me, the humans that are living here and now in the present are made of more than just memories of the past. I myself don't even know who I am; I don't have a single solitary memory about myself, but I don't believe anyone took them from me. I most likely erased them of my own free will. I was the one who made that choice, I made it for myself; so I can live in the present and the future, because I must go on believing there is a me! Angel! I know that I will never lose the you that is now a part of my memories. The you that met me and the conviction you had in what you felt you needed to do. The you that loved yourself more than anyone else ever could. I'll never forget this woman named Angel who once loved herself, yet was filled with such a doubt. You must stop denying your own existence; you have to live as a human being.
  • Roger Smith, The Big O

• Can I be your memory?
  • Sugarcult, their song Memory

• I want to live with all of my memories, even if they're sad memories. I believe that if I stay strong, someday I'll overcome the pain, and then I'll be glad that I have those memories. I believe that there are no memories that are okay to forget.
  • Natsuki Takaya, Fruits Basket (Momiji Sohma)

• When comparing human memory and computer memory it is clear that the human version has two distinct disadvantages. Firstly, as indeed I have experienced myself, due to ageing, human memory can exhibit very poor short term recall.
  • Kevin Warwick, quoted in Hendricks, V: “500CC Computer Citations”, King’s College Publications, London,2005.

• But how is Mneme dreaded by the race,
  Who scorn her warnings and despise her grace?
  By her unveil'd each horrid crime appears,
  Her awful hand a cup of wormwood bears.
  Days, years mispent, O what a hell of woe!
  Hers the worst tortures that our souls can know.
  • Phillis Wheatley, "On Recollection", Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)

• Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.
  • Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

• In memory everything seems to happen to music.
  • Tennessee Williams, The Glass Managerie

• It is notorious that the memory strengthens as you lay burdens upon it, and becomes trustworthy as you trust it.
  • Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. pt. I

• Memory is the storehouse in which the substance of our knowledge is treasured up.
  • Charles Bridges, An Exposition of Psalm 119, comment on v.55

Unsourced

• Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
  • Saul Bellow

• There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.
  • Josh Billings

• It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment—but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?
  • Lord Byron

• Memories of the past remain in the past, but as you make new memories in the present and walk towards the future, the past is still simply, the best.
  • Mark Aaron A. Corrales

• The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
  • Salvador Dalí

• A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.
  • Edward de Bono

• She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.
  • Frank Deford

• Footfalls echo in the memory
  Down the passage which we did not take
  Towards the door we never opened into the rose-garden.
  • T.S. Eliot

• The past is never dead, it is not even past.
  • William Faulkner

• Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.
  • Thomas Fuller

• I have memories - but only a fool stores his past in the future.
  • David Gerrold

• That's the funny thing about memories, we are not what we remember of ourselves. We are what people say we are. They project upon us their convictions. We are nothing but blank screens.
  • Trevor Goodchild

• Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.
  • Andre Gide

• Remember to not forget; forget to not remember
  • Dizzy Gillespie

• Original thought...often goes with a bad memory. An overstuffed brain has less need to work things out for itself.
  • Charles Handy

• Every man's memory is his private literature.
  • Aldous Huxley

• It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
  • P.D. James

• The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
  • Samuel Johnson

• It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
  • Barbara Kingsolver

• Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
  • Barbara Kingsolver

• You can close your eyes to reality, but not to memories.
  • Stanislaw Lec

• It's extraordinary How little we do remember. It's almost as if Memory is not considered useful by nature.
  • Doris Lessing

• The leaves of memory seemed to make
  A mournful rustling in the dark.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
  • Michel de Montaigne

• Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.
  • Austin O'Malley

• What we remember from childhood we remember forever—permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.
  • Cynthia Ozick

• Memory is what tells a man that his wife's birthday was yesterday.
  • Mario Rocco

• I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.
  • Diane Sawyer

• All gone. Zelazny was one of the first times I looked at something I had had familiarity with to find the spot where the memory should have been empty, replaced by a scrawled 'Moved South for the Fishing' sign. Calculus was another loss. It was quite upsetting to reach for a skill and find nothing.
  • James Nicoll (2004)

• The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche

• The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche

• Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.
  • Seneca

• The richness of life lies in the memories we have forgotten.
  • Carol Shields

• A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.
  • Carol Shields

• We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.
  • Thoreau

• In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.
  • John Updike

• The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory.
  • Oscar Wilde

• Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.
  • The Wonder Years

Anonymous

• What was hard to bear is sweet to remember.
  • Portuguese proverb

• Memory, like women, is usually unfaithful.
  • Spanish proverb