Memento Quotes & Sayings

In ancient Rome, when a victorious general paraded through the streets, legend has it that he was sometimes trailed by a servant whose job it was to repeat to him, " Memento Mori": Remember you will die. A reminder of mortality would help the hero keep things in perspective, instill some humility. Job's memento mori had been delivered by his doctors, but it did not instill humility. Instead he roared back after his recovery with even more passion. The illness reminded him that he had nothing to lose, so he should forge ahead full speed. " He came back on a mission," said Cook. " Even though he was now running a large company, he kept making bold moves that I don't think anybody else would have done. — Walter Isaacson

A morning breeze blew through the campus of Prufrock Preparatory School, rustling the brown lawn and knocking against the stone arch with the motto printed on it.
"Memento Mori"-"Remember you will die." The Baudelaire orphans looked up at the motto and vowed that before they died, they would solve this dark and complicated mystery that cast a shadow over their lives. — Lemony Snicket

It occurred to Mo that he didn't have any pictures of himself as a boy. Every photo he owned, every memento of his life, was from after. It was as if he had been born the day he left. He had gone out from here and invented himself. — Leonard Pitts Jr.

For youth, the moon is a promise of all those tremendous things which await it, for older people a memento that the promise was never kept, a reminder of all that broke and went to pieces ...
And what is moonshine? Secondhand sunshine. Diluted, counterfeit. — Hjalmar Soderberg

Photography is there to construct the idea of us as a great family and we go on vacations and take these pictures and then we look at them later and we say, 'Isn't this a great family?' So photography is instrumental in creating family not only as a memento, a souvenir, but also a kind of mythology. — Larry Sultan

I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next. (Leonard Shelby, Memento) — Christopher Nolan

My life is like a memento more painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition. — Yann Martel

O, worldly pomp, how despicable you are when one considers that you are empty and fleeting ! You are justly compared to watery bubbles, one moment all swollen up, then suddenly reduced to nothing. — Ordericus Vitalis

I'm currently shooting 'Ava's Possessions,' which is a really fun movie about a woman who gets possessed by a demon. I call it 'Memento' meets 'The Exorcist.' — Alysia Reiner

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonshingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagence goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives, Henle's loops and all. Every glistening egg is a memento mori. — Annie Dillard

In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans-not the other way around ... The only memento 'kids these days' want is a selfie. It's part of the new currency, which seems to be 'how many followers you have on Instagram'. — Taylor Swift

with aides while he wrote his memoirs, Mein Kampf, meaning 'My Struggle,' in which he gave the world's leader fair warning about what was to come. Of course, they didn't listen to him. They never do. "When Hitler got out of Landsberg, there was a gift waiting for him. One of his followers had managed to find their flag, blood and all. They presented it to Hitler as a memento of the Beer Hall Putsch, the incident that brought him to national prominence. To — Steve Martini

Matsuda-kun: Wow ... Your father died on duty and you see his memento as an amulet ...
Satou-san: Hey, give it back! You want to tell me to forget it so I can move on, right?
Matsuda-kun: No ... You don't need to forget everything ...
Satou-san: Eh?
Matsuda-kun: Wherher you can move on or not is totally up to you. If you forget your father her could ... really die, right? — Gosho Aoyama

But 'Memento' was so successful, such a huge cult hit, almost on the scale of a large film. If that had happened, with all the acclaim, before the next job, I'd have found it very difficult to figure out what to do next. — Christopher Nolan

Be Mindful of Death" (Memento Mori) — Peter Swanson

Oh, once you've been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn't want you back." Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. "We - by whom I mean anyone over sixty - commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight. — David Mitchell

When the author is not traveling, he works at an L-shaped desk, which affords a view north through a large sunny window. He writes everything on an electric typewriter because "it has to be a book from the first day," he explains. He has no daily routine because of all the traveling he does, but follows a very disciplined writing process. He writes each page six times, then places it in a three-ring binder with a DePauw University cover ("a talisman," he calls this memento from his alma mater). When he feels that he has gotten a page just right, he takes out another 20 words. "After a year, I've come to the end. Then I'll take this first chapter, and without rereading it, I'll throw it away and write the chapter that goes at the beginning. Because the first chapter is the last chapter in disguise." He always hands in a completed manuscript, and his editor is his first reader. — Jennifer M. Brown

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me. — Emil Cioran

I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there. (Leonard Shelby, Memento) — Christopher Nolan

Recording a scene with paint rather than film sinks you more deeply into your surroundings. You have to look a little harder and a little longer. And you end up with a memento. — Susan Minot

Microchimeric sharing means that, even if the mother loses a child, she'll have a small memento of him or her secreted away inside her. Similarly, a bit of our mothers live on in all of us no matter how long ago Mom died. — Sam Kean

No wreaths please - especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes - a few books perhaps. — William Carlos Williams

With The Good Lieutenant, Whitney Terrell has unwound the myths of one of our most encrusted literary forms - the war novel - and remade it to be humane and honest, glowingly new and true. Terrell knows his facts on the ground, but this is emphatically, triumphantly a work of imagination and literary ingenuity. It opens in conflagration - everything having gone wrong for Lieutenant Emma Fowler in one explosive instant - and from there the mystery of how we got to this disastrous moment unfolds backwards, Memento-like, as we watch Emma become more innocent, her life more full of hope and possibility, with each day less of war that she has experienced. This is brilliant, bold, heartbreaking storytelling for material that demands nothing less. — Adam Johnson

You should know I'm not going to save this as a memento," she said, waving the handkerchief defiantly in his face.
. "What?"
"You know, like in the movies when the gentleman hands the distraught lady a handkerchief and he finds out at the end of the movie that she's saved it for like decades as a keepsake?"
"What movie is that? It sounds awful. — Lauren Layne

I just saw Memento. It's very, very good. I watch a lot of French films. — Colleen Haskell

In memory, you can access something from the past, anything that you've experienced that you remember - it's there. Now, you might have a memento of it in a photograph or in a film or a building or some clothes that you wore. There might be something that connects you to this memory. But all of us are just all caught in this time, whatever that is. — Annie Lennox

Inside, upstairs, where the planes are met, the spaces are long and low and lined in tasteful felt gray like that cocky stewardess's cap and filled with the kind of music you become aware of only when the elevator stops or when the dentist stops drilling. Plucked strings, no vocals, music that's used to being ignored, a kind of carpet in the air, to cover up a silence that might remind you of death. — John Updike

I think one of the geniuses of Bound and The Matrix and Memento is the complete collaboration of the effort. There were no rotten apples. — Joe Pantoliano

One of the things that we talked about was this idea of 'Memento Mori' - like the reminder of our own mortality - and so we were sort of trying to express that in our press photos. And it's one of the themes of the album [Modern Vampires of the City] as well. — Rostam Batmanglij

In a sense, Open City is a kind of Wunderkammer, one of those little rooms assembled with bric-a-brac by Renaissance scholars. I don't mean it as a term of praise: these cabinets of curiousities contained specific sorts of objects - maps, skulls (as memento mori), works of art, stuffed animals, natural history samples, and books - and Open City actually contains many of the same sort of objects. So, I don't think it's as simple as literary inclusiveness. — Teju Cole

Memento mori and obey the Lord.
Art and religion love the somber chord. — Robert Frost

Whenever I go someplace I always buy something, collect something, to help me remember the trip. So I guess I collect mementos from my many travels. — Wendell Pierce

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. — Susan Sontag

Still, sometimes they leave behind a small memento, like Haida and the boxed set of Years of Pilgrimage. He probably didn't simply forget it, but intentionally left it behind in Tsukuru's apartment. And Tsukuru loved that music, for it connected him to Haida, and to Shiro. It was the vein that connected these three scattered people. A fragile, thin vein, but one that still had living, red blood coursing through it. The power of music made it possible. Whenever he listened to that music, particularly "Le mal du pays," vivid memories of the two of them swept over him. At times it even felt like they were right beside him, quietly breathing. — Haruki Murakami

The name Mary Jo Quinn was written neatly in faded blue marker on the front of the scrapbook, its gray edges frayed with age and wear, as though it had been handled often. Such a memento was a strange thing to find in a used bookstore, especially when one considered its contents. I'd discovered the handmade tome buried on the bottom shelf on the back wall of a little musty-smelling shop in the tiny resort town of Copper Harbor. This picturesque community is the gateway to Isle Royale National Park, an island in the western quarter of Lake Superior that beckoned to hikers, kayakers and canoers. Copper Harbor is the northern-most bastion of civilization in Michigan on a crooked finger of land called the Keweenaw Peninsula. Its remote, pristine shoreline provided an excellent respite from a hellacious year for my best friend from high school and me on a late September weekend. — Nancy Barr

In fact I no longer value this kind of memento.
I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.
There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I thought I did.
A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their "things," their totems. — Joan Didion

People are cast in the underclass because they are seen as totally useless; as a nuisance pure and simple, something the rest of us could do nicely without. In a society of consumers - a world that evaluates anyone and anything by their commodity value - they are people with no market value; they are the uncommoditised men and women, and their failure to obtain the status of proper commodity coincides with (indeed, stems from) their failure to engage in a fully fledged consumer activity. They are failed consumers, walking symbols of the disasters awaiting fallen consumers, and of the ultimate destiny of anyone failing to acquit herself or himself in the consumer's duties. All in all, they are the 'end is nigh' or the 'memento mori' sandwich men walking the streets to alert or frighten the bona fide consumers. — Zygmunt Bauman

What goes in the mind is forgotten, what goes in the stomach just passes through, but that which goes in the heart is locked, like a keepsake diary, that never leaves you. — Anthony Liccione

Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi? — Lionel Shriver

Things like the movie 'Memento' are interesting to me because our memories of the things we've done and how we've behaved form our notion of who we are, what our character is. So if part of that were missing, what does that actually say about you? And what does it say about your sense of responsibility for things if you can't remember them? — Paula Hawkins

Each wedding picture was less of a memento than a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario Katherine Kenton has survived. — Chuck Palahniuk

When I got the script for Memento, I read it and I got killed off on page one and I fired my agent. — Joe Pantoliano

This isn't a trunk monkey, is it." Nick
"No. It's not. It's a memento from your enemies." Caleb
"Yeah, well, at least it makes my heart surgery scar look cooler." Nick — Sherrilyn Kenyon

A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky novel, 'Memento Mori.' — Billy Collins

A garter. You're supposed to take it off and keep it as a memento. K-k-kinda like a trophy
for going far sexually with a girl. It's stupid, really. And kind of d-d-degrading if I think about
it too m-m-much."
"I know what it is," he says, amusement evident in his voice. "I just wanted to hear your
explanation. — Simone Elkeles

Shinji slowly fell forward onto his face. Debris bounced up on impact. It took less than thirty seconds for the rest of his body to die. The memento of his beloved uncle
the earring worn by the woman he loved
was now stained with the blood running down Shinji's left ear, reflecting the glow from the red flames of the farm building.
And so the boy known as the Third Man, Shinji Mimura, was dead. — Koushun Takami

You, Roman, remember to rule peoples with your power. -Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento — Virgil

That film 'Memento' creeped me out. I was looking over my back through the whole thing. I get more creeped out than scared and spill popcorn all over the place. — Brendan Sexton III

Nothing, however, bemused the Indians more than the European habit of blowing their noses into a fine handkerchief, folding it carefully, and placing it back in their pockets as if it were a treasured memento. — Bill Bryson

The very idea of inevitable death, carrying with it the manifest folly of human concerns, is at the core of ruin porn fetish. Memento mori: You and everyone you know will die and become wreckage plowed under and renewed, because that's they way of all things. Fight it and be terrified; accept it and know peace. Live accordingly. — Brian Awehali

Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts. (Leonard Shelby, Memento) — Christopher Nolan

I don't really ask myself too much where the ideas come from. When things touch you or anger you, you are moved to want to examine them, to reflect on them. But yes, I guess you could say ['Amour'] is a memento mori, though it would never occur to me to use that term, since it might sound a little bit sentimental. — Michael Haneke

My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition. I mock this skull. — Yann Martel

When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead. — Steven Soderbergh

Hospitals were to her a memento mori in bricks and mortar; an awful reminder of the inevitable end that was coming to all of us but which she felt was best ignored while one got on with the business of life. — Alexander McCall Smith

Never forget that you must die; that death will come sooner than you expect ... God has written the letters of death upon your hands. In the inside of your hands you will see the letters M.M. It means 'Memento Mori' - remember you must die. — John Furniss

I was a screenwriting major at Georgetown, and I was in class with some really strong writers like Jonathan Nolan, who co-wrote 'The Dark Knight' with Chris, his brother. He wrote 'The Prestige,' the story for 'Memento.' — Mike Birbiglia

We are warned by the Word both of our duty, our danger, and our remedy. On the sea of life there would be many more wrecks if it were not for the divine storm-signals which give to the watchful a timely warning. The Bible should be our Mentor, our Monitor, our Memento Mori, our Remembrancer, and the Keeper of our Conscience. — Charles Spurgeon

Unless it's something very clever like 'Memento,' most independent films have a very tough life out there. — Allison Anders

Memento Mori' means 'Remember you will die. — Lemony Snicket

What's happened to my life? These ten-year chunks that are doled out to you in passports are a cruel form of memento mori. How many more new passports will I have? One (1965)? Two (1975)? Such a long way off, 1975, yet your passport life seems all too brief. How long did he live? He managed to renew six passports. — William Boyd

I used to run with Chris Nolan before he was 'Chris Nolan.' I remember when he was trying to sell 'Memento,' and he just couldn't. — Drew Daywalt

Sarah, honey, I hardly think kidnappers are going to take the time to buy a memento of their stay. I could be wrong, but it seems rather unlikely. — Christine Feehan

Pronunciamento of memento is risorgimento that let slip the meat-and-potatoes. — Anyaele Sam Chiyson