Quotes about Memory

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

"You must love this place very much," said Miss Fenn... "So many homes are like twenty others. But this is unique, and you seem to know every cranny of it. I dare say you could never love another home so well." "Oh, I carry it with me," said Deronda... "To most men their early home is no more than a memory of their early years... The image is never marred. There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side."

The first photograph I ever experienced consciously is a picture of my mother from before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, it's a black-and-white photograph, which means that many of the details have been lost, turning into nothing but gray shapes.

The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the angels of our nature.

I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction.

Many Christians are like sieves. Put a sieve into the water, and it is full; but take it out of the water, and it all runs out. So, while they are hearing the sermon, they remember something of value. But, like the sieve, as soon as they have left the church, all is forgotten.

Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.

You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play. I tell you Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said.

Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.

Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.