Now we walk out into the tunnel of days
and a million memories rustle
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.
I have no memory. Sometimes I do things. I don’t know who I am.
sifted through my memories, as though through debris, trying to find a reason.
Art is connection. It’s the thread between people. It’s history, protest, memory, and possibility
She was an old woman now, and her life had become memories. (beginning of "Lullaby")
I let the lagoon speak for my memory
though offended by water hyacinth
waste and nightsoil…