37 Quotes About Cherishing Memories

In the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, moments that warm our hearts and soothe our souls often pass by unnoticed. Yet, it is these cherished memories that ultimately define us, weaving together the tapestry of our personal history. Whether it's the quiet comfort of a shared laugh, the beauty of a sunset watched with a loved one, or a simple moment of solitude that brought peace, such memories are treasures worth holding onto. Dive into a curated collection of 37 powerful quotes that celebrate the art of cherishing memories. Let these words inspire you to pause, reflect, and embrace the meaningful moments that life has to offer.

1. “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

2. “Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.” - Zora Neale Hurston

3. “Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.You forget some things, dont you?Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.” - Cormac McCarthy

4. “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

5. “Homeopaths argue that water has a memory.” - Scarlett Thomas

6. “And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

7. “The faces you clutch at desperately slip away; it's when you're not thinking about them that their features flash past. It can happen on a street corner, at the turn of a staircase, because somebody said a word, because some image, an image has passed. Then the face is there for a split second, very fragile. One mustn't grasp at it, or it whisks away. One might as well try and catch a cloud. It was a cloud.” - Francois Maspero

8. “In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.” - Octavia Butler

9. “I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.” - Stephen King

10. “Already, I know that all of this will stay with me forever. It'll haunt me, but I also fear it will make me feel grateful. I say fear because at times I really don't want this to be a fond memory until it's over. I also fear that nothing really ends at the en. Things just keep going as long as memory can wield its ax, always finding a soft part in your mind to cut through and enter.” - Markus Zusak

11. “When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.” - Alice Hoffman

12. “She could sense it very clearly: for me, no less than for her, the past counted far more than the present, remembering something far more than possessing it. Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing, banal, inadequate ... She understood me so well! My anxiety that the present 'immediately' turned into the past so that I could love it and dream about it at leisure was just like hers, was identical. It was 'our' vice, this: to go forwards with our heads forever turned back.” - Giorgio Bassani

13. “Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.” - Gail Caldwell

14. “In spite of the three hours I spent combing over the details, I have, to this day, a very persistent certainty that hidden inside me is the revolting knowledge of days when I wasn't quite myself. I now suspect that my inexplicable bouts of exhaustion are due to the massive effort of keeping those days behind me.” - Tony Burgess

15. “I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.” - Samantha Hunt

16. “when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. ” - Steiner G

17. “I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.” - Marilynne Robinson

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

19. “The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.” - Jorge Luis Borges

20. “In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

21. “If a woman is given only a limited amount of time to spend with the man she loves, she endures the separation by constantly recalling and reliving every moment down to the finest detail.” - Lucy De Barbin and Dary Matera

22. “Dipping into the archive is always an interesting, if sometimes unsettling, proposition. It often begins with anxiety, with the fear that the thing you want won't surface. But ultimately the process is a little like tapping into the unconscious, and can bring with it the ambivalent gratification of rediscovering forgotten selves.Rather than making new pictures why can't I just recycle some of these old ones? Claim "found" photographs from among my boxes? And have this gesture signify "resistance to further production/consumption"? (96)” - Moyra Davey

23. “As individuals die every moment, how insensitive and fabricated a love it is to set aside a day from selfish routine in prideful, patriotic commemoration of tragedy. Just as God is provoked by those who tithe simply because they feel that they must tithe, I am provoked by those who commemorate simply because they feel that they must commemorate.” - Criss Jami

24. “Smells, I think, may be the last thing on earth to die.” - Fern Schumer Chapman

25. “Memories are nice little possessions. As long as you don't ignore the present when you take them out to play.” - Nora Roberts

26. “In the darkness of night,Demons strut, taunting, goading.In the light of day,Angels sing glorious songs.In the time in between,We live our lives alone and searching.And sometimes, softly,You understand damnation.All is forgotten, all is lost,All but forgivenessAnd the memory of her kiss.” - Lisa Mangum

27. “the inletour friend looks as he didwhen we first knew him,and until I wake I believeI will die of grief, for I knowthat this boy grew into a manwho was a faithful friendwho died.” - Wendell Berry

28. “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.” - Julian Barnes

29. “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

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

31. “We may just be specters in this world, but our stories, if they are remembered and retold, become real and solid and alive... Once you hear a story, it becomes part of you. It can't die.” - Candace Fleming

32. “Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.” - Sigmund Freud

33. “Since childhood, I was afflicted with a sick hypersensitivity, and my imagination quickly turned everything into a memory, too quickly: sometimes one day was enough, or an interval of a few hours, or a routine change of place, for an everyday event with a lyrical value that I did not sense at the time, to become suddenly adorned with a radiant echo, the echo ordinarily reserved only for those memories which have been standing for many years in the powerful fixative of lyrical oblivion.” - Danilo Kis

34. “Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things - landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people - that would otherwise have melted from my memory.” - David Gentleman

35. “Memories dancing through ageless ripples of time, waiting to be shared.” - Al Cash

36. “Experiences that we remember intrusively, despite desperately wanting to banish them from our minds, are closely linked to, and sometimes threaten, our perceptions of who we are and who we would like to be.” - Daniel L. Schacter

37. “Have you ever been homesick for someplace that doesn'tactually exist anymore? Someplace that exists only in yourmind?” - Jenny Lawson