150 Memorable Quotes

In the vast world of literature, cinema, and everyday conversation, certain quotes have a way of sticking with us. They inspire, provoke thought, or simply make us smile. This collection of the top 150 memorable quotes has been carefully curated to bring you the wisdom, wit, and insight from a diverse range of voices throughout history. Whether you are seeking motivation, enlightenment, or just a moment of reflection, these quotes offer something truly special. Join us as we explore these timeless words that continue to resonate across generations.

1. “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” - William Faulkner

2. “How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together.It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.” - Michael Cunningham

3. “Memory is the happiness of being alone.” - Lois Lowry

4. “Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.” - James Thurber

5. “One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.” - Rita Mae Brown

6. “Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.” - William Gibson

7. “It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven...” - Virginia Woolf

8. “What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,The labor of an age in pilèd stones,Or that his hallowed relics should be hidUnder a star-y-pointing pyramid?Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?” - John Milton

9. “Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.” - John Lahr

10. “It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' says the White Queen to Alice.” - Lewis Carroll

11. “Reiko had not kept a diary and was now denied the pleasure of assiduously rereading her record of the happiness of the past few months and consigning each page to the fire as she did so.- Death in Midsummer and Other Stories” - Yukio Mishima

12. “Man's memory shapesIts own Eden within” - Jorge Luis Borges

13. “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” - Cormac McCarthy

14. “Not marble nor the gilded monumentsOf princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,But you shall shine more bright in these contentsThan unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.When wasteful war shall statues overturnAnd broils roots out the work of masonry,Nor mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burnThe living record of your memory.'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmityShall you pace forth; your praise shall still find roomEven in the eyes of all posterityThat wear this world out to the ending doom.So, till judgement that yourself arise,You in this, and dwell in lovers eyes.” - William Shakespeare

15. “O may I join the choir invisibleOf those immortal dead who live againIn minds made better by their presence; liveIn pulses stirred to generosity,In deeds of daring rectitude...” - George Eliot

16. “Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.” - Marilynne Robinson

17. “That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example 'where they were' when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored.” - David Foster Wallace

18. “No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

19. “Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.” - William Butler Yeats

20. “Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.” - Percy Bysshe Shelley

21. “To remember a man’s name is to give him eternal life” - Bill Gunn

22. “Memory is not only unruly, leaving us in the lurch when most needed, but stupid as well, putting its nose into places where it is not wanted.” - Balthasar Gracian

23. “Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH:A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay'dBy your/their indiff'rence in the dank brown shadeBelow the garden...His mind's eye sees them quoted on the bottom third of a right-hand page in a (possibly) olive-bound book he read at least five years ago. When he does find them, it will be a great nuisance if no clue is given to their authorship.” - Edward Gorey

24. “The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.” - Walter Benjamin

25. “Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory” - James Stephens

26. “Forbidden to remember, terrified to forget; it was a hard line to walk.” - Stephenie Meyer

27. “I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.” - Raymond Carver

28. “And I'll dance with you in Vienna,I'll be wearing a river's disguise.The hyacinth wild on my shouldermy mouth on the dew of your thighs.And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,with the photographs there and the moss.And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,my cheap violin and my cross.” - Leonard Cohen

29. “...It is only now that memory works both ways. Which of us dreamed it - those from the country of nights five times as warm and as cold, or those who turned away and woke?” - Angele Ellis

30. “It is, I think, the rarest of leisure, hard work mixed with hard pleasure, to refine one's time of deep thought or light regard into the utterly self-absorbed and equally and abundantly outward-seeking shape of the personal essay -- a story comprised of found fact, of analyzed emotion, of fictive memory.” - Barry Lopez

31. “(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.” - Julio Cortazar

32. “Oh, we do not understand death, we never understand it; creatures are only truly dead when everyone else has died who knew them.” - Arthur Schnitzler

33. “You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire.The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other... In this moment, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled... A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).” - Roland Barthes

34. “In the Land of Memory the time is always Now.In the Kingdom of Ago, the clocks tick... but their hands never move.There is an Unfound Door(O lost)and memory is the key which opens it.” - Stephen King

35. “A kind of memory that tells usthat what we're now striving for was oncenearer and truer and attached to uswith infinite tenderness. Here all is distance,there it was breath. After the first homethe second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

36. “Time's the thief of memory” - Stephen King

37. “Loss alone is but the wounding of a heart; it is memory that makes it our ruin.” - Brian Ruckley

38. “But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.” - Marcel Proust

39. “It was one of those strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of his life. There was no telling what made these moments different from any other, though he knew them when they came. He had seen sights more gruesome and more beautiful by far, and been left with no more than a fleeting muddle of their memory. But these-- the still moments, as he called them to himself-- they came with no warning, to print a random image of the most common things inside his brain, indelible.” - Diana Gabaldon

40. “Wspomnienie nie dawało mu spokoju. Można je było wytrzymać przez chwilę i to tylko z perspektywy nieuleczalnej choroby, w wyraźnym przeczuciu nadchodzącej śmierci.” - Vladimir Nabokov

41. “The only thing faster than the speed of thought is the speed of forgetfulness. Good thing we have other people to help us remember.” - Vera Nazarian

42. “I think the secret to a hoppy life is a selective memory. Remember what you are most grateful for and quickly forget what your not.” - Richard Paul Evans

43. “It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.” - Ally Condie

44. “As we age we begin to grasp at youthful bliss like a life raft in a sea of harsh reality.” - Brad Herzog

45. “...early on Monday evening, when the sky was the color of a velvet ribbon falling over the hills.” - Alice Hoffman

46. “I bet you think fellas are the ones to remember a girl -- don't you?"He shook his head hurriedly, that he'd always thought that."Fellas have all the fun 'n she just sees one right after another, so it seems like HE'D remember her, better 'n SHE'D remember him, only it works the other way around. I ain't forgot one single fella, all these years. But I bet there ain't TWO 'd know me from a big of bananas this minute.” - Nelson Algren

47. “To my mind's eye, my buried memories of Brandham Hall are like effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it is only with effort that I see them in terms of colour. There are things I know, though I don't know how I know them, and things that I remember. Certain things are established in my mind as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like the landscape of a dream.” - L.P. Hartley

48. “It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).” - Lauro Martines

49. “We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers.” - Angela Davis

50. “El margen sabe lo que el centro olvida, seguramente porque la memoria es el poder del vencido. El triunfador sabe que, como decía Nietzsche, "para ser feliz hay que olvidar", pero ese olvido, aunque le haga feliz, no le hace verdadero.” - Reyes Mate

51. “Never hide your fear because it will become your own God, hidden inside you.” - Sorin Cerin

52. “[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.” - Milan Kundera

53. “I feel as if I had opened a book and found roses of yesterday sweet and fragrant, between its leaves.” - L.M. Montgomery

54. “What isn't remembered never happened.Memory is merely a record...you just need to rewrite that record.” - Yoshitoshi ABe

55. “Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.” - Siri Hustvedt

56. “Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.” - Siri Hustvedt

57. “Any time gone by was better.” - Jorge Manrique

58. “Only those with no memory insist on their originality.” - Coco Chanel

59. “Memory is like a curse. We fall into eternity, and memory is a weight that keeps pulling us to where we can never go back to.” - José Luis Peixoto

60. “And of the fact that every vision of the past is a vision of the blind” - Jacques Roubaud

61. “...here we have the first lesson about the nature of memory: what you wish to forget, you may not be able to. What seems to have died, perhaps is just asleep. On the other hand, sometimes you wish to remember something, and there it stands at the doorway of your consciousness, and refuses to come in. You know you know something, the name of some useless celebrity, perhaps, and yet you cannot fish that name out of your inner aquarium. And this illustrates a critical feature of memory, which resembles, as it turns out, most of the processes in the internal realm: the same cause will regularly yield different, even opposite effects.” - Noam Shpancer

62. “It was an image Melody would never forget. Or was it the emotions the image conjured - hope, excitement, and fear of the unknown, all three tightly braided together, creating a fourth emotion that was impossible to define. She was getting a second chance at happiness and it tickled like swallowing fifty fuzzy caterpillars.” - Lisi Harrison

63. “Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lost” - Kevin Arnold

64. “...not all encounters with the world affect the mind equally. Studies have demonstrated that if the brain appraises an event as "meaningful," it will be more likely to be recalled in the future.” - Daniel J. Siegel

65. “To lead a human life, a man must have a notion of himself as having a past and a future.” - Mary Warnock

66. “Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world.” - Daniel J. Siegel

67. “I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room” - Audrey Niffenegger

68. “I sit quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memories standing out.” - Audrey Niffenegger

69. “I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing; It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.” - Lorrie Moore

70. “The point, I decided, wasn't to have the autobiography or even the memories. The point was who I became when I wrote.” - Elizabeth J. Andrew

71. “All the products of one period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses. And nothing reminds me so much of the monthly parts of Notre-Dame de Paris, and of various books by Gérard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer's door at Combray, than does, in its rectangular and flowery border, supported by recumbent river-gods, a 'personal share' in the Water Company.” - Marcel Proust

72. “I Came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary individuals, pridigies from the long tail of humanity's bell curve, or was there something we could all learn from their talents?” - joshua foer

73. “I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That’s why I want to write a book.” - Haruki Murakami

74. “People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.” - Meg Wolitzer

75. “The objective of learning is not necessarily to remember. It may even be salutary to forget. It is only when we forget the early pains and struggles of forming letters that we acquire the capacity for writing. The adult does not remember all the history s/he learned but s/he may hope to have acquired a standard of character and conduct, a sense of affairs and a feeling of change and development in culture. Naturally there is nothing against having a well-stocked mind provided it does not prevent the development of other capacities. But it is still more important to allow knowledge to sink into one in such a way that it becomes fruitful for life; this best done when we feel deeply all we learn. For the life of feeling is less conscious, more dream-like, than intellectual activity and leads to the subconscious life of will where the deep creative capacities of humanity have their being. It is from this sphere that knowledge can emerge again as something deeply significant for life. It is not what we remember exactly, but what we transform which is of real value to our lives. In this transformation the process of forgetting, of allowing subjects to sink into the unconscious before "re-membering" them is an important element.” - Henning Hansmann

76. “In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.” - Téa Obreht

77. “Hindi mo pwedeng mahalin ang isang tao nang hindi mo minamahal ang hilaga, silangan, timog at kanluran ng kanyang paniniwala. Kapag nagmahal ka’y dapat mong tanggapin bawat letra ng kanyang birth certificate. Kasama na doon ang kanyang libag, utot at bad breath. Pero me limit. Pantay-pantay ang ibinibigay na karapatan sa lahat ng tao upang lumigaya, o masaktan, o magpakagago, pero kapag sumara na ang mga pinto, nawasak na ang mga puso, nawala na ang mga kaluluwa at ang bilang ay umabot na sa zero, goodbye na. Pero, the memory of that one great but broken love will still sustain you, tama nga na mas matindi ang mga alaala.” - Ricky Lee

78. “Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.” - Samuel Johnson

79. “The unreality of the past weeks lifted like a fog, but its residue remained. All of the past is like that, but most especially the parts that are out of the ordinary.” - Madeline Claire Franklin

80. “VLADIMIR: (after a moment of bewilderment). We'll see when the time comes. (Pause.) I was saying that things have changed here since yesterday.ESTRAGON: Everything oozes.VLADIMIR: Look at the tree.ESTRAGON: It's never the same pus from one second to the next.VLADIMIR: The tree, look at the tree. Estragon looks at the tree.ESTRAGON: Was it not there yesterday?VLADIMIR: Yes of course it was there. Do you not remember? We nearly hanged ourselves from it. But you wouldn't. Do you not remember?ESTRAGON: You dreamt it.VLADIMIR: Is it possible you've forgotten already?ESTRAGON: That's the way I am. Either I forget immediately or I never forget.” - Samuel Beckett

81. “What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?''History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly.'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. ...'Finn?''"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." (quoting Patrick Lagrange)” - Julian Barnes

82. “The day that I left my home, I had prayed that my children would forget me. I wanted to spare them the pain of remembering. But that night, as I crouched in the white mist, waiting, I knew more than anything that I wanted them to remember, I wanted desperately to go on living in someone's memory. If we are not remembered, we are more than dead, for it is as if we had never lived.” - Karen Maitland

83. “Do you remember those days? Back porch, sunshine, mason jars" - she paused at remembered sweetness - "we were so foolish then...thinking there was a big ol' world out there to conquer.” - Melissa Marr

84. “People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things - where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance - but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting. I am exhausted from the effort to forget... There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.” - Stephen Carpenter

85. “You always know more than you think you know without being aware of it. You always remember best what has hurt most.Memory is a reflex of the pain. Knowledge is the memory of the pain combined with the unconsciousness which we 'rationalize' via dreams or by means of reading literature. It is impossible to learn from someone else's experience unless we don't assume this experience as our own's, which we can achieve only by living it anew and from scratch. We can not live our lives at someone else's expense. Only life fraught with dangers and risks and lived as your own's deserves its name. Only selfish people do not live their lives as if they do not belong entirely to them. Cowardice equals a life that you refuse to live at its fullest and at its most dangerous.” - Martin Walser

86. “Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but I could not find that castle today, nor tell you the color of that woman's hair. Who knighted me, old friend? What were my favorite foods? It all fades. Sometimes I think I was born on the bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of fire in my mouth and a hole in my chest. Are you my mother, Thoros?” - George R.R. Martin

87. “Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?” - Thomas Mann

88. “Hesitantly, I touched the stump where my finger used to be. In my mind, something almost remembered itself, but the fumes of turpentine were making me a little lightheaded; whatever memory was on the verge of coughing itself up was gone even before it materialized. Out the window, I could see a squirrel was stumbling erratically around in circles underneath the old basketball net. Then I realized that it wasn't a squirrel; it was a brown paper bag.” - Dan Chaon

89. “Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.” - Michael Ondaatje

90. “I thought you had forgotten me.”“I have spent my life remembering you.” - Meredith Ann Pierce

91. “The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map.” - Fern Schumer Chapman

92. “What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.” - Julian Barnes

93. “If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.” - Julian Barnes

94. “Still, he was pleased to know that he could recall so much of the play and passed the rest of the journey pleasantly in reciting lines to himself, being careful not to snort.” - Diana Gabaldon

95. “The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.” - Charles Wright

96. “He felt lighter than he had in weeks, and he realized that the monster he had been running from wasn’t really a monster after all. It was simply that place in the heart that holds the measure of your history, the joy and the grief, the laughter and the tears, the magic and the wonder; all the ingredients that add up to the story of a life well lived.” - Lilli Jolgren Day

97. “You should always be taking pictures, if not with a camera then with your mind. Memories you capture on purpose are always more vivid than the ones you pick up by accident.” - Isaac Marion

98. “I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

99. “,,,we forget our good actions only slowly, and in fact never truly forget them.” - Machado de Assis

100. “Once, in his first term, Cartwright had been bold enough to ask him why he was clever, what exercises he did to keep his brain fit. Healey had laughed."It's memory, Cartwright, old dear. Memory, the mother of the Muses... at least that's what thingummy said.""Who?""You know, what's his name, Greek poet chap. Wrote the Theogony... what was he called? Begins with an 'H'.""Homer?""No, dear. Not Homer, the other one. No, it's gone. Anyway. Memory, that's the key.” - Stephen Fry

101. “You can never replace someone you love like that. Eventually the memories won’t be so hard on you. With time, the memories will make you smile and you will be grateful for having them.” - NM Facile

102. “Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility” - Barbara Kingsolver

103. “Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.” - Oliver Sacks

104. “The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.” - E.M. Forster

105. “And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was a memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. Cut off from everything that was familiar to him, unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him him nowhere but into himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. Far from troubling him, this state of being lost because a source of happiness, of exhilaration. He breathed it into his very bones. As if on the brink of some previously hidden knowledge, he breathed it into his very bones and said to himself, almost triumphantly: I am lost.” - Paul Auster

106. “When he recalls it in later years, he will wonder if he is distorting it, embellishing it, because each time he consciously recalls her, that forms a new memory, a new imprint to be stacked on top of the previous one. He fears that too much handling will make it crumble.” - Abraham Verghese

107. “There’s no such thing as yesterday, he thought dully. Memory is just today, happening over and over again, stamped indelibly with regret.” - Helen Maryles Shankman

108. “Time takes no holiday. It does not roll idly by, but through our senses works its own wonders in the mind. Time came and went from one day to the next; in its coming and its passing it brought me other hopes and other memories. [quoted in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 54]” - Augustine of Hippo

109. “Sometimes memory is the only gift we give ourselves and the only hope we have of finding our way home.” - Harley King

110. “We carry our childhood with us.” - Gary D. Schmidt

111. “I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch‐light ; and, to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume...” - Lord Byron

112. “Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

113. “আমাদের সেই কথোপকথন, সেই বাক্যালাপগুলিগ্রন্থিত করলেপৃথিবীর একটি শ্রেষ্ঠ প্রেমের কবিতা হতে পারতো;হয়তো আজ তার কিছুই মনে নেইআমার মনে সেই বাক্যালাপগুলি নিরন্তর শিশিরহয়ে ঝরে পড়ে,মৌমাছি হয়ে গুনগুন করে স্বর্ণচাঁপা আর গোলাপহয়ে ঝরতে থাকে;সেই ফুলের গন্ধে, সেই মৌমাছির গুঞ্জনেআর কোকিলের গানেআমি সারারাত ঘুমাতে পারি না, নিঃশ্বাস ফেলতেপারি না” - Mahadeb Saha

114. “He was thinking of that time, the way one does on long journeys when rootlessness and boredom, lack of sleep or routine can summon from out of nowhere random stretches of the past, make them as real as a haunting. --Solar” - Ian McEwan

115. “But maybe that's what the dead do. They stay. They linger. Benign and sweet and painful. They don't need us. They echo all by themselves.” - Sangu Mandanna

116. “...I want to live doubly - first with you and then afterwards in memory ...” - John Geddes

117. “How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at age thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.Honda felt that his youth had ended with the death of Kiyoaki Matsugae. At that moment something real within him, something that had burned with a vibrant brilliance, suddenly ceased to be.Now, late at night, when Honda grew weary of his legal drafts, he would pick up the dream journal that Kiyoaki had left him and turn over its pages.(...)Since then eighteen years had passed. The border between dream and memory had grown indistinct in Honda’s mind. Because the words contained in this journal, his only souvenir of his friend, had been traced there by Kiyoaki’s own hand, it had profound significance for Honda. These dreams, left like a handful of gold dust in a winnowing pan, were charged with wonder.As time went by, the dreams and the reality took on equal worth among Honda’s diverse memories. What had actually occurred was in the process of merging with what could have occurred. As reality rapidly gave way to dreams, the past seemed very much like the future.When he was young, there had been only one reality, and the future had seemed to stretch before him, swelling with immense possibilities. But as he grew older, reality seemed to take many forms, and it was the past that seemed refracted into innumerable possibilities. Since each of these was linked with its own reality, the line distinguishing dream and reality became all the more obscure. His memories were in constant flux, and had taken on the aspect of a dream.” - Yukio Mishima

118. “human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions” - Salman Rushdie

119. “[...] the first lesson about the nature of memory: what you wish to forget, you may not be able to. What seems to have died, perhaps is just asleep.” - Noam Shpancer

120. “Any experience deeply felt makes some men better and some men worse. When it has ended, they share nothing but the recollection of a commitment in which each was tested and to some degree found wanting. [...] The consequences of the journey change the voyager so much more than the embarking or the arrival.” - Murray Kempton

121. “What business does memory have with time?” - Jess Walter

122. “Financial crashes happen precisely because the people who remember the last one have either died or retired and thus are no longer around, with memories and character formed by that previous experience, to warn people not to be irresponsible.” - N.T. Wright

123. “But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.” - Marcel Proust

124. “It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

125. “True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.” - Siri Hustvedt

126. “Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.” - Robert Penn Warren

127. “Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.” - Mary Karr

128. “Entre más recordamos, más cerca estamos de la muerte.” - Rafael Perez Gay

129. “What happened was this: I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind that become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters.” - Robert Penn Warren

130. “To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.” - Marita Golden

131. “...dark embers smolder inside me - one touch and they flare - who would have thought memory combustible, or near you bright sparks appear?...” - John Geddes

132. “Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.” - Joyce Carol Oates

133. “Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.” - Frank McCourt

134. “I kissed my fingers,held my palm flat beside my mouth and blew it into the air that surrounded her memory. I closed my eyes, thinking this was one of those moments you see in movies or read about in books where everything comes together.” - Belinda Jeffrey

135. “We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson

136. “Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all.” - Marcel Proust

137. “My mom used to say that’s why we have memory. And the opposite of memory—hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.” - Isaac Marion

138. “Just as the room of the Inquisitor in Dr. Talos's play, with its high judicial bench, lurked somewhere at the lowest level of the House Absolute, so we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of our minds a counter at which we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present.” - Gene Wolfe

139. “Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.” - Mark Lawrence

140. “Ricci created memory palaces in his mind. Each item in the palace represented a series of concepts. The rooms and locations within the palace served as directories and files, similar to computer data storage. Ricci instantaneously learned, retained and retrieved hundreds of new Chinese kanji, to the astonished delight of Chinese nobles.” - Janet M. Tavakoli

141. “I now know how your angercame from skeletonsthat rattled in your heartand you couldn't escape them.” - Susie Clevenger

142. “You, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon—” - Ayn Rand

143. “To hear never-heard sounds, To see never-seen colors and shapes, To try to understand the imperceptible Power pervading the world; To fly and find pure ethereal substances That are not of matter But of that invisible soul pervading reality. To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul; To be a lantern in the darkness Or an umbrella in a stormy day; To feel much more than know. To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain; To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon; To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves; To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching. To be a smile on the face of a woman And shine in her memory As a moment saved without planning.” - Dejan Stojanovic

144. “Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.” - Julian Barnes

145. “What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?” - Roland Barthes

146. “Perfume is the key to our memories” - Kate Lord Brown

147. “One of my friends at the Compound has a photographic memory. Everything she ever sees, reads, or hears, she remembers forever in perfect detail.” - Kasie West

148. “Stebuklas, kai jį patiri, niekuomet nėra pilnas, tik atmintis padaro jį tokiu.” - Erich Maria Remarque

149. “Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.” - joshua foer

150. “Over the last few millennial, we've invented a series of technologies … that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to outsource this fundamental human capacity.” - joshua foer