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.
“My first beauty memory is watching my mum apply blue mascara.”
A lot of times, when I tell my story, I tear up because it brings a lot of those memories back.
When I look back at my childhood, I’ve got fond memories of big family gatherings.
I’ve got fond memories of being in a private British school in Kenya.
Even when I go there now, I smell the air and it brings back childhood memories.
“To write in Bikol is to insist that our language, our memory, and our identity matter.”
I engage with history, with memory; I hover between two places, which is a way of forming insight.