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.
Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
Unliving things have no passions, and no memory: mere matter is the amnesia of the universe.
I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards.
What you are is the memory, bundle of memories, experiences, thoughts.
Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.
Blest pair! if aught my verse avail,
No day shall make your memory fail
From off the heart of time.
The good old days always seemed better in distant memory than they had actually been at the time.