Quotes on Memories

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

I told you I try not to live in the past and nothing could change the fact that my mum was gone. But I’m a liar. The truth was, I’d had one dream ever since I was six: to see my mum again. To actually get to know her, talk to her, go shopping, do anything. Just be with her once so I could have a better memory to hold on to.

Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.

That is the nature of endings, it seems. They never end. When all the missing pieces of your life are found, put together with glue of memory and reason, there are more pieces to be found.

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.

What happened to the world was gradual. I've forgotten what it actually was, but I have faint, fetal memories of what it was like. A smoldering dread that never really caught fire till there wasn't much left to burn. Each sequential step surprised us. Then one day we woke up, and everything was gone.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

The loss of memory isn't always the problem; sometimes--maybe even often--it's the solution.

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.

And I never started to plow in my life That some one did not stop in the road And take me away to a dance or picnic. I ended up with forty acres; I ended up with a broken fiddle— And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories, And not a single regret.

does a sick society get so used to its illness that it can't remember being well? what if the memory is too dangerous for the people who like things the way they are?

Heaven was the place where you kept alive the dreams of your memories.

Ordinarily men exercise their memory much more than their judgment.

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library

It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory, but when you succeed, you start to realize that you're capable of far more than you imagined.

Back to him she would never go, but in her lonely life still lived the sweet memory of that happy time when she believed in him and he was all in all to her.

Our emotional mind will harness the rational mind to its purposes, for our feelings and reactions-- rationalizations-- justifying them in terms of the present moment, without realizing the influence of our emotional memory.

All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.