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Memory Quotes

Browse 2122 quotes about Memory.

Memory Quotes

“When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it's happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting. [...] We die without knowing what we have lived.”

TimeMemoryPresentForgetting
Book:Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
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“When a memory fails to appear, it seems as though the time when it was created did not really exist, and maybe that is true. Time itself is nothing; only the experience of it is something. When that dies, it assumes the form of a denial, the symbol of mortality, what you have already lost before you lose everything. When his friend had said something similar to his father, his response had been, "If you had to retain everything, you’d explode. There’s simply not enough space for it all. Forgetting is like medicine; you have to take it at the right time.”

MemoryForgetting
Book:Roads to Berlin
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“I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing—as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it’s the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence.”

BookPastMusicYouthTravelMemoryInnocenceEmptinessNothingnessBeingForgettingRosesRoadVacuityBeing And NothingnessRoad Novel
Book:Beginner's Luke
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“It is getting dark. In the low mists over the hills, an orange glow broods, as if the trees are on fire. Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly. Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?”

MemoryForgettingSilence Speaks
Author:Tan Twan Eng
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“The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock.”

PainMemoryObsessionHopelessUnrequited LoveAnguishAcheCompulsionCompulsive
Book:The Goldfinch
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“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.”

PainMemory
Author:Martin Walser
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“Blessed moments are just like droplets of water, once they touch the ground they never return the same. Such are those beautiful memories that melt our hearts. Those moments happen only once. They take our breath away in a few minutes but imprint it in our memory forever. Once we no longer experience such moments our minds remember these beautiful memories but a few seconds later agony floods in. When a moment becomes a memory it is a very painful experience.”

LifePainMemoryLove Quotes And Sayings
Book:A Broken Woman: From a child that was loved dearly into a teen that has lost her strength
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“I will be waiting for you at the end of every blind alley, under the lonely streetlamps of a city that will no longer be ours. When the wind grows colder and the huge piles of settled leaves sit there for a week or two, unshielded from the curious gaze of passersby, I will be waiting for you. I will be waiting for what could have been and for what will never be; For the letters that never arrived, the letters that were never sent, and the letters that will never be written.”

LovePainHopeWaitingMissingMemoryRemembrance
Author:Malak El Halabi
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“He looked at me like I was the stars when all I’d ever felt like was the dark nothingness between them.”

FeelingsBeautifulRomanceDesireQuotesPassionLostStarsMemoriesLossLove QuotesGriefSadnessSadHeartbreakQuoteLongingMemoryLove Quotes And SayingsLustDevotionGrievingBreakupBroken HeartGrief And LossLove QuoteLost LoveUnrequited LoveLove QuotationsHeartbrokenRemindersDeep ThoughtsSad QuotesWithout YouFeelings And EmotionsGrief QuotesMissing SomeoneStarRomanticismAmourThe PastBreakup QuotesUnrequitedHeartbreak QuotesLoss Of LoveMemories QuotesMemory QuoteBreak UpsLoss QuotesFeelings Of LoveBeautiful QuoteI Miss YouLost Love QuotesReminiscingSad QuoteMissing You QuotesReminiscenceHeartbroken QuotesThe One That Got AwayBreakup QuoteRanata SuzukiRanata Suzuki QuoteBreak Up QuoteLoss QuoteReminisceParamourStarry Eyed
Author:Ranata Suzuki
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“To be unable to connect with your own past through the act of memory must feel like you were losing a connection to the building blocks of your very identity. If we are the sum of our experiences, what do we become when those experiences vanish from our mind? Do we ourselves eventually disappear?”

SelfMemoryDementiaAlzheimer
Book:Just Beyond the Light: Making Peace with the Wars Inside Our Head
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“Jimmie both was and wasn’t aware of this deep, tragic loss in himself, loss of himself. (If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.)”

SelfScienceBrainPsychologyIdentityMemoryNeuroscienceAmnesia
Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
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“...he solved all the puzzles, and could solve them easily; and he was far better and sharper than anyone else at games. And as he found this out, he grew fretful and restless again, and wandered the corridors, uneasy and bored and with a sense of indignity—games and puzzles were for children, a diversion. Clearly, passionately, he wanted something to do: he wanted to do, to be, to feel—and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose...”

LifeSelfBrainPsychologyIdentityMemoryAmnesia
Book:Gratitude
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“Personal memory – the palest of all lights – is the wellspring of personality and creativity. Memory is the also the cornerstone of culture and the basis of community and family relationships. Without memories of our thoughts and actions, we would not recognize our individual self. Without personal memories, there is no personal character or soul of a nation. Without contextual memories, the concept of universal principles of goodwill and the individual desire to perform noble selfless acts would be moot. There can be no symmetry in any human relations without memories to provide a baseline foundation for reflection and contemplation. It would fatally tax a person’s desire to achieve fairness in their personal dealings without memories of prior acts of greed or benevolence to provide structure for judging the merits of their current behavioral options. Without the haunting of memory to remind us of our propensity to hate outsiders and readiness to overlook the disfranchised, there would be wholesale discrimination and unchecked commission of infamous crimes.”

SelfMemoriesPersonalityMemoryMemoirMemoir WritingMemories QuotesMemory Loss
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Does being true to one's self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one's self? It hardly matters by this time. By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corners of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particle, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions - what happened and what might have happened - come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight. Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story.”

SelfVisionIdentityMemoryNarrativeHindsight
Book:Leaving Brooklyn: A Novel
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