Quotes have the power to inspire, motivate, and stay with us long after we’ve read them. Whether you’re seeking a spark of wisdom or a comforting reminder, the right words can make all the difference. In this collection, we’ve gathered 34 memorable quotes that are sure to leave a lasting impression and provide meaningful insight for any moment.
1. “But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.” - Tim O'Brien
2. “Remember me when I am deadand simplify me when I'm dead.” - Keith Douglas
3. “Then one morning she’d begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn’t remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she’d realized again what she’d learned at five when her mother left – that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting the small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she’d worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother’s voice, the color of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree’s heartwood.” - Ron Rash
4. “so here i sit. a sum of the parts. about a third way down this wonderful path, so to speak. and i've been thinking lately about a friendship that fell apart with time, with distance, and with the misunderstanding of youth. i'm trying not to confuse sadness with regret. not the easiest thing at times. i dont regret that certain things happened. i understand that perhaps i had a choice in the matter, or perhaps i believe in fate. probably not, but so far actions as small as the quickest glance to events as monumental as death have pushed me slowly along to right here, right now. there was no other way to get here. the meandering and erratic path was actually the straightest of lines. take away a handful of angry words, things once thought of as mistakes or regrets, and i'm suddenly a different person with a different history, a different future. that, i would regret. so here i sit. thinking about a person i once called my best friends. a man who might be full of sadness and regret, who might not give a damn, or who might, just might, remember the future and realize that's where its at.” - chris wright
5. “You know that the things you put it your head stay there, right?''Yeah. But you remember some things, don't you?''Yeah. You remember the things you want to forget and forget the things you want to remember.” - Cormac McCarthy
6. “Whenever you see redwoods in the National Geographic, or fog, or watch Shamu on TV, you'll be seeing me. Whenever you smell pine and spruce and day-old socks, that's me. Whenever you hear wind in the tops of trees, that's me, and whenever you taste crab and wine and Brie, that's me, and whenever the wind blows your hat off or you get under a cold shower, that's me. Whenever you read about an earthquake, that's me, sure as gun's iron. Whenever you smell wet dog, that's Curtis and me, and whenever you see a Rattus rattus, that's Forrest, and I'm right behind him. Never see me again? You'll never not see me. And I'll never not see you . . .Didn't I say I'd always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.” - Anne Rivers Siddons
7. “Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. ” - Janet Fitch
8. “I seemed to be upon the verge of comprehension, without the power to comprehend as men, at time, find themselves upon the brink of rememberance, without being able, in the end, to remember.” - Edgar Allan Poe
9. “Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.” - Anne Rice
10. “One couldn’t be selective when remembering the past. Ignore the turmoil, chaos and pain – and the truly great memories would not shine with such luster.” - Karen Fowler
11. “Trying to forget really doesn't work. In fact, it's pretty much the same as remembering. But I tried to forget anyway, and to ignore the fact that I was remembering you all the time.” - Rebecca Stead
12. “Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.” - Sholem Asch
13. “Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.” - Haruki Murakami
14. “One day this war will end. And when it does, Tule Lake will be just a memory.” - Teresa R. Funke
15. “Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.” - A.L. Kennedy
16. “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
17. “I remember when your name was just another name that rolled without thought off my tongue.Now, I can’t look at your name without an abundance of sentiment attached to each letter.Your name, which I played with so carelessly, so easily, has somehow become sacred to my lips.A name I won’t throw around lightheartedly or repeat without deep thought.And if ever I speak of you, I use the English language to describe who you were to me. You are nameless, because those letters grouped together in that familiar form….. carries too much meaning for my capricious heart.” - Jamie Weise
18. “When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail--it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name.” - Chuck Klosterman
19. “They would think she was savoring the taste (blueberries, cinnamon, cream-excellent), but she was actually savoring the whole morning, trying to catch it, pin it down, keep it safe before all those precious moments became yet another memory.” - Liane Moriarty
20. “I have to live if I want to be remembered.” - Suzanne Young
21. “Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?” - Roger Zelazny
22. “Do you remember what we just did? Please tell me you remember what we just did."She briefly toyed with the idea of lying and saying no, just to see the look on his face, but she'd had enough of having her brain played with – it wouldn't be too sporting to do the same to him. "Yes, I remember, and don't you think for one minute that just because you had me on my back screaming I was 'yours'," she waved four fingers in quotation marks in front of his face, "that it gives you any kind of ownership over me, because it doesn't."He looked annoyed, then relieved, then he laughed. "Yeah, whatever, baby.” - Dianna Hardy
23. “I wish I had a memory of that first violent shove, the shock of cold air, the sting of oxygen into new lungs. Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.” - Lauren DeStefano
24. “I remembered standing in the middle of the street in front of The Crooked Bookshelf, filled with the certainty of a future. I had heard the wolves howling behind the house and remembered how glad I had been to be human.” - Maggie Stiefvater
25. “Sometimes, to overcome a hurdle before us, we don't need to search for new truth or understanding of God so much as we need to live out what we already know.” - Amy Layne Litzelman
26. “You are speaking...as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing... what you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure.” - C.S. Lewis
27. “You know the saying a rolling stone gathers no moss? I'm the opposite. I've gathered too much, and when one thing happens, it brings up everything else that's ever been similar to it. I don't just feel things once and then move on. I fell them over and over again, and the only new thing is whatever precipitated the memory of the old, so it never really feels new at all. Everything just gets integrated into one big giant ball...” - Jane Devin
28. “Max.God, but she was stubborn. And tough. And closed in. Closed off. Except whenshe was holding Angel, or ruffling the Gasman’s hair, or pushing somethingcloser to Iggy’s hand so he could find it easily without knowing anyone hadhelped him. Or when she was trying to untangle Nudge’s mane of hair.Or-sometimes-when she was looking at Fang.He shifted on the hard ground, a half-dozen flashes of memory cyclingthrough his brain. Max looking at him and laughing. Max leaping off a cliff,snapping out her wings, flying off, so incredibly powerful and graceful thatit took his breath away.Max punching someone’s lights out, her face like stone.Max kissing that weiner Sam on Anne’s front porch.Gritting his teeth, Fang rolled onto his side.Max kissing him on the beach, after Ari had kicked Fang’s butt.Just now, her mouth soft under his.He wished she were here, if not next to him, then somewhere in the cave, sohe could hear her breathing.It was going to be hard to sleep without that tonight.” - James Patterson
29. “The whole world can't lick us but we can lick ourselves by longing too hard for things we haven't got any more - and by remembering too much.” - Margaret Mitchell
30. “I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.” - John Green
31. “Forget the names because names lie but remember me because when you look at me I remember myself.Remember me because I will never forget you.” - Jordan Weisman
32. “You remember too much,my mother said to me recently.Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?” - Anne Carson
33. “How will I be remembered by my children? This is the true measure of a man.” - Brian Herbert
34. “The words of the bards come down the centuries to us, warm with living breath.” - Pádraig Pearse
