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 will make you always remember this place, this day, and me.
Though yet of Hamlet, our dear brother's death,
The memory be green.
Tell me the tales that to me were so dear,
Long, long ago, long, long ago.
If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls,
Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me.
Oh, how cruelly sweet are the echoes that start
When Memory plays an old tune on the heart!