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Memory Quotes

Memory has a small number of very good, well-sourced lines. Oscar Wilde, in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), calls it the diary we all carry about with us. William James, in The Principles of Psychology (1890), says that forgetting is as important a function of the intellect as recollecting. Ray Bradbury, in Long After Midnight (1976), says that God gives us dreadful gifts and the most dreadful is memory.

The flagged lines are the kind that circulate on social media. “Remember me with smiles and laughter” is credited to Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory” to Dr. Seuss, and a line about the sap in the trees carrying the memory of the red man to Chief Seattle. All three are marked misattributed.

Random quote on Memory

Most quoted on memory:

From perfect grief there need not be
Wisdom or even memory;
One thing then learned remains to me —
The woodspurge has a cup of three.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

What I know was passed to me by others, and so must surrender the toll which information tends to pay when it passes through the minds and memories of others.

Iain Banks Inversions (1998)

And the plaster dented from your fist
in the hall where you had your first kiss
reminds you that the memories will fade.

Chris Carrabba

The wind is full of memories;
It whispers low and clear
The sacred echoes of the past,
And brings the dead more near.

Elizabeth Chase Allen Poems (1866)

The depression and suicidal fantasies of three years ago are nothing but a memory to me now.

Joey Comeau

The same CREB switch is important for many forms of implicit memory in a variety of other species, from bees to mice to people.

Eric Kandel In Search of Memory (2006)

How could memories feel so close and so far away at the same time?

Linda Sue Park A Long Walk to Water (2010)

"If things are deprived of memory, they become information or commodities. They are pushed into a time-free, ahistorical place."

Byung-Chul Han The Scent of Time (2009)

Stern and white as a tomb, older than the memory of the dead, and built by men or devils beyond the recording of myth, is the mansion in which we dwell.

Clark Ashton Smith The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith (1931)

In the midst of the storms, doubts and anxieties of the present, we want to affirm our roots, to make a grateful memory, we are the people of memory.

Arturo Eduardo Fajardo Bustamante

"Invest in memories. It’s ultimately what life is about—people, places, moments and experiences."

Jessica Butcher

Yes
in my hermitage it tempts:
loneliness
world memory
and that I consider myself a poet.

Miron Białoszewski

O, Genevieve, sweet Genevieve,
The days may bring me joy or woe,
But still the hands of Memory weave
The blissful dreams of long ago,
Sweet Genevieve!

George Cooper

It's great to share those memories and tell those stories

Bernard Parker

I used to go there to fish for crayfish; those are happy memories. My heart calmed down instantly. I didn't know it yet, but I was practicing visualization.

Marie-José Pérec

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP

Leonard Nimoy

The advisers and counselors were not, however, analyzing the danger or even the possibility. They were serving only as the custodians of bad memories.

John Kenneth Galbraith The Great Crash, 1929 (1954)

A memory steals in from lost heavens of Truth,
A wide release comes near, a Glory calls,
A might looks out, an estranged felicity.

Sri Aurobindo Savitri (1918)

My memory is not as good as... Chief Justice Roberts.

Joe Biden

We live under the shadow of the last War and its memories still sicken us. We remember what modern warfare is, with no glory in it but the heroism of man.

Stanley Baldwin

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