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Memory Quotes

Browse 2122 quotes about Memory.

Memory Quotes

“The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. And besides, a fresh reality will perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires on account of which we set out on our journey.”

NovelPsychologyGeniusMemorySodom And Gomorrah
Book:In Search Of Lost Time 4: The Captive
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“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.”

SelfNovelInfiniteMemoryNostalgiaEpicFrenchMetafictionMemory Trigger
Book:In Search of Lost Time
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“She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.”

PhilosophyNovelMemoryMeaning Of LifeExistentialismContinuityCzech
Book:The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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“[T]his jealousy gave him, if anything, an agreeable chill, as, to the sad Parisian who is leaving Venice behind him to return to France, a last mosquito proves that Italy and summer are still not too remote. But, as a rule, with this particular period of his life from which he was emerging, when he made an effort, if not to remain in it, at least to obtain a clear view of it while he still could, he discovered that already it was too late; he would have liked to glimpse, as though it were a landscape that was about to disappear, that love from which he had departed; but it was so difficult to enter into a state of duality and to present to oneself the lifelike spectacle of a feeling one has ceased to possess, that very soon, the clouds gathering in his brain, he could see nothing at all, abandoned the attempt, took the glasses from his nose and wiped them; and he told himself that he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be time enough later on, and settled back into his corner with the incuriosity, the torpor of the drowsy sleeper in the railway-carriage that is drawing him, he feels, faster and faster out of the country in which he has lived for so long and which he had vowed not to allow to slip away from him without looking out to bid it a last farewell.”

MemoryJealousyRemembranceDualityLove Lost
Book:Swann’s Way
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“He saw everything he related. It passed before him, as he spoke, so vividly, that, in the intensity of his earnestness, he presented what he described to me, with greater distinctness than I can express. I can hardly believe, writing now long afterwards, but that I was actually present in these scenes; they are impressed upon me with such an astonishing air of fidelity”

LoveMemoryDevotionStorytellingSinceritySelflessnessFidelityEarnestness
Book:David Copperfield
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“No person is more ruthlessly cheated than someone strip-mined of his or her ability to recall the vibrancy of the past. After all, what would any person be if robbed of all sense of long-term memory? Without memories, all that any person would know about life is if he or she was hungry or thirsty, cold or hot. Without memories of the past and shredded of any illusion of a future there cannot be a frame for our existence. Without a sense of memory, we lack cognition of the very essence of our being. In absence of our memories, there can be no introspection, no ethical awareness, and no devotion, loyalty, or love.”

LoveMemoriesAwarenessMemoryLoyaltyDevotionIntrospectionRememberingMemories QuotesMemory QuoteReminiscenceRecollections
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Every life has a soundtrack. There is a tune that makes me think of the summer I spent rubbing baby oil on my stomach in pursuit of the perfect tan. There's another that reminds me of tagging along with my father on Sunday morning to pick up the New York Times. There's the song that reminds me of using fake ID to get into a nightclub; and the one that brings back my cousin Isobel's sweet sixteen, where I played Seven Minutes in Heaven with a boy whose breath smelled like tomato soup. If you ask me, music is the language of memory.”

MusicMemory
Book:Sing You Home
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“Somewhere, the radio was playing—WCRB again, soft classical. I didn’t register it at first. I was too busy putting my keys down, toeing off my shoes, breathing into the hush. But then the melody changed. Piano. Slow. Familiar. It was Adagio cantabile. Not Joel’s version, with its doo-wop backbone and lovesick harmonies. Beethoven’s. The real thing.”

MusicMemoryBeethovenBilly Joel
Book:Comings and Goings - The Art of Being Seen : A Jim Garraty Story
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“The Fading Game by Stewart Stafford Though your life was stolen from me, I greedily wanted—and want—more. Death made us necessary strangers, And you, hostage to a timepiece fog. Pain’s screams in the kettle’s whistle— The brittle choreography of survivor’s guilt, Self-loathing: I had let you flee my memory, Your voice relapsed to white noise in life’s static. Assuming my agitated reaction made you recoil, As you faded as soon as you had arrived, The desire to connect was overridden by mutual bartering for a wary ceasefire. © 2026, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

DeathLossGriefMemoryContemporary PoetryElegySurvivors GuiltPsychological PoetryFuneral PoemSuburban Gothic
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“Death has many pieces. At the very end, our lives fractured, and the shards swam away to where they belonged. The still-living carry those parts around with them: kind words and gentle skin-touches and sweet, sweet tears. The best parts of us are elsewhere, spread out across the land in a fine mist of memory. Our voices are the last thrumming of an insect's wing on a web. All that lodges here is the shape of our ending.”

DeathGriefMemory
Book:Falling Animals
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“I remember the first year after my stepmother’s death. I saw her in everything. It wasn’t on purpose. I wasn’t looking for her, she just showed up. Unexpected and alive and also not alive in my life. I remember walking in Brooklyn and there was a woman who looked just like her… ducking into the Blue Stove bakery and I thought very simply, “Of course. She loves good food.” And then of course, I knew it wasn’t her, it was only the back of someone’s head really. And then it turned out to be a woman who did not look like her at all. That’s how it happens, right? All of you who have lost someone, you know it, you’ve seen it. The visitation seems like a gift and also a hard memory of grief.”

DeathLossGriefMemoryMourningVisitationMistaken IdentityVisitations
Author:Ada Limon
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