Inspirational In Memory Of Quotes & Sayings

I give a damn if any fan recalls my legacy, I'm trying to live life in the sight of GOD's memory. — Mos Def

All life is bound to a simple truth ... that time goes on, that in each person's life begins a tale, a tale that will either end in memory or in legend. — M.J. Chrisman

Once time is lit, it will burn whether or not you're breathing it in. Even after smoke becomes air, there is the memory of smoke. I am seeing as if by the light of a match, a glimpse of my life and having it feel right. — David Levithan

To speak truth, sir, I don't understand you at all: I cannot keep up the conversation, because it has got out of my depth. Only one thing I know: you said you were not as good as you should like to be, and that you regretted your own imperfection
one thing I can comprehend: you intimated that to have a sullied memory was a perpetual bane. It seems to me, that if you tried hard, you would in time find it possible to become what you yourself would approve; and that if from this day you began with resolution to correct your thoughts and actions, you would in a few years have laid up a new and stainless store of recollections, to which you might revert with pleasure. — Charlotte Bronte

Every event creates a memory in the heart; photographs remind and reinforce that memory in the future, — Debasish Mridha

Now, Jasper, as a great man once said, 'A brave and steadfast heart can overcome any fear.' So don't worry. I'll be back with Benelaius shortly. In the meantime, look about for clues, only don't disturb anything.
[ ... ]
I knew only too well who that great man was whom he spoke of. Camber Fosrick. I had committed the quote to memory as well. So Lindavar, one of the War Wizards of Cormyr, was addicted to trashy literature too. I would have chuckled had I not been so scared. — Chet Williamson

Here's to everyone who has survived something devastating
something that shattered your self-confidence and distorted your world in one blow. Whether you were fierce in the face of it or fell to pieces or shoved it out of sight for years
I don't care how you got here. Every day you are stronger. Every day you are healing. Every day that you survive, you are telling that event, that person, that illness, that memory: YOU DO NOT DEFINE ME. Keep on.
Acknowledgements — Tammara Webber

Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You've crossed through nothingness or dream to another island in Time. — Roger Zelazny

Unhappy memories are persistent. They're specific, and it's the details that refuse to leave us alone. Though a happy memory may stay with you just as long as one that makes you miserable, what you remember softens over time. What you recall is simply that you were happy, not necessarily the individual moments that brought about your joy.
But the memory of something painful does just the opposite. It retains its original shape, all bony fingers and pointy elbows. Every time it returns, you get a quick poke in the eye or jab in the stomach. The memory of being unhappy has the power to hurt us long after the fact. We feel the injury anew each and every time we think of it. — Cameron Dokey

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know. — Rene Daumal

It's not magic. I remember because I make comparisons. Not in terms of better or worse, just different. And not all of these memories are great, but they're mine.
Which lends way to believe, that none of our lives are put together on an assembly line. We're not pre-packaged with memories or programmed with stories. We have to make our own. — Shane Koyczan

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory. — Henri Bergson

I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it's just my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. [...] What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. [...] Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it's you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It's when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. — Toni Morrison

Conscious access to memory is a unique trait of living things, but memory itself is not. It's encoded in the minute vibrations between elementary particles. Our entire universe is built of information given shape. Part of that is its history. Its memory. — M.R. Graham

Your skin has a memory.
In ten, twenty, thirty years from now,
your skin will show the results of
how it was treated today.
So treat it kindly and with respect. — Jana Elston

Life is a flower in the garden of humanity. It blooms for a short time and then slowly it disappears and becomes a memory on the canvas of infinite time. — Debasish Mridha

What are we after when we open one of those books? What is it that makes a classic a classic? ... in old-fashioned terms, the answer is that it wll elevate your spirit. And that's why I can't take much stock in the idea of going through a list of books or 'covering' a fixed number of selections, or anyway striving for the blessed state of having read this, or the other. Having read a book means nothing. Reading a book may be the most tremendous experience of your life; having read it is an item in your memory, part of your receding past ... Why we have that odd faith in the magic of having read a book, I don't know. We don't apply the same principle elsewhere: We don't believe in having heard Mendelssohn's violin concerto ...
I say, don't read the classics
try to discover your own classics; every life has its own. — Rudolf Flesch

Though he was tired of loneliness - tired down to the depths of his heart - that was really not was troubled him most. What tortured him was the hunger in his soul. A longing. A quiet voice that could not be stilled. Not a threatening voice - or a nagging one. But a persistent calling. Like a parent who calls an errant child back to dinner. Or a father who calls for a son to join him down at the pier for a fishing trip; like a voice echoing off the lake. It was a strangely familiar voice that was calling. A little like the memory of a reunion, long forgotten. Why did he resist it, even fear it? Why would he not respond to a call that came to him in a way that sounded, and felt, so much like family? — Craig Parshall

They'd fallen into an easy routine, the three of them. Breakfast together in the morning, then Hughie would leave for work and she and Nell would get started in the house. Lil found she liked having a second shadow, enjoyed showing Nell things, explaining how they worked and why. Nell was a big one for asking why-why did the sun hide at night, why didn't the fire flames leap out of the gate, why didn't the river get bored and run the other way?-and Lil loved supplying answers, watching as understanding dawned on Nell's little face. For the first time in her life, Lil felt useful, needed, whole. — Kate Morton

Time thins the cloth of memory. As the ages pass, its rich colors fade. Strong wool is beaten by the elements until the pattern of its lesson disintegrates, leaving holes in the truth it was meant to carry on. Even the stains of blood bend and bleed, leaving but faded blotches without meaning, mere shadows of lessons that came before, their warnings lost within the obscure impression that remains. — Melissa McPhail

The houses have been condemned on Memory Lane
I'm tired of this struggle that leaves everything the same
I've tried so hard to make it work
that I'm dying inside
Well, you can take my past
But you can't have my tomorrow

Promises that remain promises are useless and they're cheap
I wish I could put a price on words so I could make them keep
I put so much faith in you
I lost all my faith in me
Well, you can take my past
But you can't have my tomorrow

I'm giving up on giving up
I can't leave it all to prayer
'Cause the first step in getting better
is knowing what's not there
You said you'd make it better
and that just makes it worse
Well, you can take my past
But you can't have my tomorrow

Yes, I want my life to last
So you can't have my tomorrow
No, you can't have my tomorrow — David Levithan

how you were moved by a child in its mother's arms, how you saw an old man on his deathbed, and how it was your father who lay there dead, who had passed on to the silent dead - remember this, remember this. Forget, forget nothing, don't forget the sweetness, don't forget the severity. If indifference and unkindness take hold of your being, stir your memory and think of all the beautiful, and all the burdensome things. Remember there is life and there is death, remember there are moments of bliss and there are graves. Do not be forgetful, but instead remember this. — Robert Walser

In our beautiful memory
We were all handsome
We could all sing
We all had the heart
Of the prettiest girl in town
And we all hit .300 — John Buck O'Neil

Use this day to honor the memory of Christmas - whilst it remains celebrated in your life. — Eleesha

Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel's childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things - the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal. — Dan Simmons

An act of kindness may take only a moment of our time, but when captured in the heart the memory lives forever. — Molly Friedenfeld

The comfort and nostalgia of the past you once knew does not exist anymore, but in the subjective experiences of your memory. You can not go back; you can not live there anymore, for you are here.
You are now.
If you linger in the past, you find you are really nowhere at all. A ghost trapped between two worlds. A shadow of your True self.
And who knows the future, except God, the great 'I Am'?
So, why not create fond memories today? — Mac MacKenzie

Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells us his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differentials calculus. It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is, commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter. — Primo Levi

You can make a difference in another person's life and not realize it, just by giving them One Moment of your time, One Memory to recall, One Motion that tells them they are not alone! OM! — Deb Simpson

The Losing of Love ... Like discovering a shard of heaven's handwriting in the snowflake that has landed upon your hand, desperately wishing you could give such beauty to your best friend before it melts away. And what you are left with is an exquisite regret - the eloquent conspiracy of memory - of the moment lived and the moment wished for that never will arrive. — Carew Papritz

Think about what it would mean to fight," he said. "Say we barricade ourselves here in the hotel and refuse to leave. They come at us with their Weapon, whatever it is. Some of us are hurt, some die. We go out to meet them with whatever weapons we can find - sticks, maybe, or pieces of broken glass. We battle each other. Maybe they set fire to the hotel. Maybe we march into the village and steal food from them nad they come after us and beat us. We beat them back. In the end, maybe we damage them so badly that they're too weak to make us leave. What do we have? Friends and neighbors and families dead. A place half destroyed, and those left in it full of hatred for us. And we ourselves will have to live with the memory of the terrible things we have done. — Jeanne DuPrau

Emotions are like muscles. Most of them go highly unattended, it's usually the weaker, undefined ones that cause injury to the rest, and there is most certainly memory response in play. — Erica Goros

If arts and music, precious gifts in themselves, were akin to memory, literature was the self-knowing of the species; the human mind accumulated, a manifest of wisdom and knowledge, self-doubt and awareness, folly and foible, all transmitted through the generations. Books amplified the light of mind, reinforced the soul. — Mark Cantrell

It is often advantageous to forget. Forget your wincing humiliations, forget life's blows, and get on. For blocks in every direction, down every street in the city, people not yet old enough to have lines on their foreheads were laughing away memory, warmly ensconced in shrines of forgetfulness. Those who followed the word of God and those who preferred what the priests called "hoodoo" alike. People everywhere forgetting with drink or forgetting with religion or forgetting with the numbing quality of their many heaps of things. They looked forward and imagined rosy tomorrows, and gave up whatever horrors heckled their dreams, and listened to the pretty stories of whomever ruled their pulpit. — Anna Godbersen

Now these [battles] too are over, and already we see once more in the dim light of the future the tumult of the fresh ones. We--by this I mean those youth of this land who are capable of enthusiasm for an ideal--will not shrink from them. We stand in the memory of the dead who are holy to us, and we believe ourselves entrusted with the true and spiritual welfare of our people. We stand for what will be and for what has been. Though force without and barbarity within conglomerate in sombre clouds, yet so long as the blade of a sword will strike a spark in the night may it be said: Germany lives and Germany shall never go under! — Ernst Junger

I have tried to use memory and invention together, like two hands engaged in the same muddy work of digging up the past. — Emma Donoghue

The abscess is a distant memory. The pain is gone. This dinner with her hosts and her health-care team, this week of seeing another country and another culture, this time of being in demand, this moment is reality. I am a lucky girl, (Judy) thinks. — Shireen Jeejeebhoy

I have a scar-a faint gouge in my knee from when I fell down on the sidewalk as a child. It's always seemed stupid to me that none of the pain I've experienced has left a visible mark; sometimes, without a way to prove it to myself. I began to doubt that I had lied through it at all, with the memories becoming hazy over time. I want to have some kind of reminder that while wounds heal, they don't disappear forever- I carry them everywhere, always, and that is the way of things, the way of scars.
That is what this tattoo will be, for me: a scar. And it seems fitting that it should document the worst memory of pain I have. — Veronica Roth

... food is capable of feeding far more than a rumbling stomach. Food is life; our well-being demands it. Food is art and magic; it evokes emotion and colors memory, and in skilled hands, meals become greater than the sum of their ingredients. Food is self-evident; plucked right from the ground or vine or sea, its power to delight is immediate. Food is discovery; finding an untried spice or cuisine is for me like uncovering a new element. Food is evolution; how we interpret it remains ever fluid. Food is humanitarian: sharing it bridges cultures, making friends of strangers pleasantly surprised to learn how much common ground they ultimately share. — Anthony Beal

Time is ungovernable, but grief presents us with a choice: what do we do with the savage energies of bereavement? What do we do with the memory - or in the memory - of the beloved? Some commemorate love with statuary, but behavior, too, is a memorial, as is a well-lived life. In death, there is always the promise of hope. The key is opening, rather than numbing, ourselves to pain. Above all, we must show our children how to celebrate existence in all its beauty, and how to get up after life has knocked us down, time and again. Half-dead, we stand. And together, we salute love. Because in the end, that's all that matters. How hard we loved, and how hard we tried. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

And like that, the decades disappeared and the memory of that night came to life again. The way John had known it would. He didn't fight it, didn't work to stay in the here and now. If he was going to go back, then he wanted to relive it. All of it. — Karen Kingsbury

Short stories can be like photographs, catching people at some moment in their lives and trapping the memory for ever . There they are, smiling or frowning, looking sad, happy, serious, surprised ... And behind those smiles and those frowns lie all the experience of life, the fears and delights, the hopes and the dreams — Katherine Mansfield

Each of us, if we would grow, must be committed to excellence. The championships, the money, the color; all of these things linger only in the memory. It is the spirit, the will to excel, the will to win; these are the things that endure. — Vince Lombardi

There are no humans left. I should not be alone. I can't help but wonder that. There were so many of us living. But time started growing young four years ago. It isn't four years anymore. It's a number I wouldn't even be able to say. It feels like four years. It's trapped in my tender memory as four years. It's been an age. Multiple ages. It's been lifetimes; every single lifetime that used to exist. I remember my mother screaming. I recall the doctors naming me as nurses wiped away her blood and covered her face with white. The end of the play. It's been so long. Why am I alone? — F.K. Preston

But we never get back our youth ... The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. — Oscar Wilde

So these things happen, deep in our lives. We do not speak of them. We hide them even from ourselves, but they do not leave us. — David Malouf

Dreams are memories.
Memories are dreams.
But my time with you hasn't become a dream just yet.
Because the sensation of your kisses
keep me from sleep.
I'm in love,
God help me, I'm in love. — F.K. Preston

Create a trophy room in your heart. Each time you experience a victory, place a memory on the shelf. Before you face a challenge, take a quick tour of God's accomplishments. Look at all the paychecks he has provided, all the blessings he has given, all the prayers he had answered. Imitate the shepherd boy David. Before he fought Goliath, the giant, he remembered how God had helped him kill a lion and a bear (1 Samuel 17:34-36). He faced his future by revisiting the past. — Max Lucado