Let us not burthen our remembrance withA heaviness that's gone.
— The Tempest
Quotes About Memories
Sophia Loren maintains that every memory, even the painful ones, belongs to you and shapes who you are. Gabriel García Márquez takes the opposite view, calling the heart's memory an artifice that drops the bad and inflates the good. This disagreement runs through any honest look at recollection. Emily Brontë views memories as a rapturous anguish she dares not indulge. Virginia Woolf compares lives to gongs striking and blows on the neck. Charles Dickens observes that the streets we have only seen as children always look small when we go back to them.
Memory raises the question of what we remember and what we do with it. Rosa Parks considered memories as things that continue in others, passed along as deeds and works. Stefan Zweig notes that war destroys hopes and expectations, which are immaterial. The past changes with each return, like those small streets that only looked grand to a child.
Memory raises the question of what we remember and what we do with it. Rosa Parks considered memories as things that continue in others, passed along as deeds and works. Stefan Zweig notes that war destroys hopes and expectations, which are immaterial. The past changes with each return, like those small streets that only looked grand to a child.
— The Waves
The streets looked small, of course. The streets that we have only seen as children always do I believe when we go back to them
— David Copperfield
And the memories of all we have loved stay and come back to us in the evening of our life. They are not dead but sleep, and it is well to gather a treasure of them.
— The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
— Love in the Time of Cholera
You are young," replied Athos, "and your bitter memories have time to change into sweet ones.
— The Three Musketeers
I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.
— White Nights
I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie's dresses and the way she laughed.
— The Stranger
Why don’t we keep track of the happy moments, so that afterward we will believe them? Is he the same man Was he really sincere?
It's all right, Ginny. It's over. It's just a memory.
— Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.
— Persuasion
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
— The Waste Land and Other Poems
The general root of superstition: namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.
— The Collected Works of Sir Francis Bacon
Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the veranda drinking tea and your ducklings swim on the pond, and everything smells good. . . and there are gooseberries.
— Gooseberries
Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
— Ficciones
The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.
— Philippics
Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?
— The Magic Mountain
Open thy mind; take in what I explain and keep it there; because to understand is not to know, if thou dost not retain...
— Paradiso
[I]n the end this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.
— Collected Works
If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases hurting stays in the memory.
The desire for glory is no different from that instinct for preservation that is common to all creatures. It is as if we enhance our being if we can gain a place in the memory of others; it is a new life that we acquire, which becomes as precious to us as the one we received from Heaven.
— Persian Letters
If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.
I may be a little like the grown-ups. I must have grown old.
No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors… This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.