Quotes & Sayings About Memory And Life

With death, all suffering would end. Doubt would end. Shame and guilt would end. All her questions would end. Memory - most mercifully of all - would end. She could quietly excuse herself from life. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head. — Jeffrey Eugenides

We scatter small parts of ourselves as we journey through life, pieces that are stored by others and about which we may have no memory. — Olivia Lichtenstein

After you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of earth? What one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet. What's your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive. — Douglas Coupland

The idea that one will die is more painful than dying, but less painful than the idea that another person is dead, that, becoming once more a still, plane surface after having engulfed a person, a reality extends, without even a ripple at the point of disappearance from which that person is excluded, in which there no longer exists any will, any knowledge, and from which it is as difficult to reascend to the idea that that person has lived as, from the still recent memory of his life, it is to think that he is comparable with the insubstantial images, the memories, left us by the characters in a novel we have been reading. — Marcel Proust

It's not real. Love is a product of habit and routine. If you break that habit and change those routines, the person you've loved and lost and can't live without suddenly becomes an easy memory to file in the back of your mind . In other words, love isn't a heart condition. It's not even an emotional one. It's just a four-letter word we use when we want to control someone else and ruin their life if we ever decide to walk out on them — Morgan Parker

New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance - romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we'll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we'll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot. — Andre Aciman

Language is the memory of man. Without it he has no past, a paltry present, and an empty future. With it he can bring his dreams to life. — Edward R. Murrow

We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one. — Ann Druyan

Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope. — Miguel De Unamuno

Daily life is an ongoing adaptation process of imprinting our memory's storage center with useful data and the ceaseless expurgation of undesirable facts, exfoliation of destructive thoughts, and weeding out annoying emotional quirks that seemingly sprout out of thin air. — Kilroy J. Oldster

And they will pause just for an instant, and give a sigh to me, and think, "Poor girl!" believing they do great justice to my memory by this. But they will never, never realize that it was my single opportunity of existence, as well as of doing my duty, which they are regarding; they will not feel that what to them is but a thought, easily held in those two words of pity, "Poor girl!" was a whole life to me, as full of hours, minutes, and peculiar minutes, of hopes and dreads, smiles, whisperings, tears, as theirs: that it was my world, what is to them their world, and that in that life of mine, however much I cared for them, only as the thought I seem to them to be. Nobody can enter into another's nature truly, that's what is so grievous. — Thomas Hardy

Sometimes a glance, a few casual words, fragments of a melody floating through the quiet air of a summer evening, a book that accidentally comes into hands, a poem or memory-laden fragrance may bring about the impulse which changes and determines our whole life. — Anagarika Govinda

Each in the most hidden sack kept
the lost jewels of memory,
intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,
the fragment of public or private happiness.
A few, the wolves, collected thighs,
other men loved the dawn scratching
mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.
For me happiness was to share singing,
praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.
I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:
my life had no use on earth. — Pablo Neruda

I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments. — Julian Barnes

Happiness is in love, in service, and in beautiful memory. — Debasish Mridha

At that stage of your life, there'll be no past or future for you; until I give you my breast, you'll have no memory of contentment in the past nor expectation of relief in the future. Once you begin nursing, everything will be in reverse, and all will be right with the world. NOW is the only moment you'll perceive; you'll live in the present tense. In many ways, it's an enviable state. — Ted Chiang

If you will take me for your wife, Walter, I will love you dearly. If you will let me go with you, Walter, I will go to the world's end without fear. I can give up nothing for you - I have nothing to resign, and no one to forsake; but all my love and life shall be devoted to you, and with my last breath I will breathe your name to God if I have sense and memory left. — Charles Dickens

If to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing consolation to know that you have not lived in vain. And I flatter myself that it will not be ranked among the least grateful occurrences of your life to be assured that, so long as I retain my memory, you will be thought on with respect, veneration, and affection by your sincere friend. — George Washington

Cabeza de Vaca had wrapped her in his arms and in his language, whispering about a life she did not understand although understanding seemed to form just beyond the sea and sand, waiting there for her to grow older. Even when the story confused her, she had caught words or phrases, ideas like fish, bold and surprising, tasting of her father's mind. She had learned quickly to nod and speak because he needed her to do this, because his need surrounded her like the blue sky. She was his bastard, and he had loved her. Yes, he had loved her. That was the memory she couldn't bear. — Sharman Apt Russell

I have forgotten more of my life than I remember, and with my forgetting I have lost my being. — Russell Hoban

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

I wouldn't mind the early autumn if you came home today I'd tell you how much I miss you and know I'd be okay. It's funny how we never know exactly how our life will go It's funny how a dream can fade with the break of day. Time can't erase the memory and time can't bring you home Last Summer was a part of me and now a part is gone. - Margaret — Jacqueline Woodson

But my life, oh, my life, had been a constant search for an enormous dream in which my fellow creatures and animals, plants, chimeras, stars, and minerals were in a pre-established harmony, a dream that is forgotten because it must be forgotten, and is sought desperately, and only sporadically does one find its tragic fragments in the warmth of a person, in some specific situation, a glance - in memory too, of course, in some specific pain, some moment. I loved that harmony with a passion; I loved it in voices, voices. And then, instead of harmony, there was nothing but scraps and tatters. And perhaps that alone is what it means to be a poet. — Aleksander Wat

Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into. — William Zinsser

Let there be children and old people but few whose occupation is neither hope nor memory. Let there have been immigration at some point: enough to fill the convenience stores, the foreign restaurants, but let it be forgotten. Let the children be all in school, a breath held in, released at 3 o'clock across the park. Let the town's rhythm be unquestioned. Let me be single: no children, no family. Let me not fit in. — Joanna Walsh

[E]verything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones - they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor - please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience - with our senses and our nerves - is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos. — Keith Ridgway

Left to my own devices, would I trade this for firm thighs, fewer wrinkles, a better memory? On some days. That's why it's such a blessing I'm not left to my own devices. Because the truth is I have amazing friends and a deep faith in God, to whom I can turn. I have a cool kid, a sweet boyfriend, darling pets. I've learned to pay attention to life, and to listen. I'd give up all this for a flatter belly? Are you crazy? — Anne Lamott

And as long as she lives, as long as she thinks of me with fondness and the memory of our life together brings her comfort, I will honor her for it. I will love her above all else in this world and the next. And there is nothing you can do to stop it. — Anonymous

Nothing endures for so long as fear. Everywhere in nature one sees evidence of innate releasing mechanisms literally millions of years old, which have lain dormant through thousands of generations but retained their power undiminished. The field rat's inherited image of the hawk's silhouette is the classic example - even a paper silhouette drawn across a cage sends it rushing frantically for cover. And how else can you explain the universal but completely groundless loathing of the spider, only one species of which has ever been known to sting? Or hatred of snakes and reptiles? Simply because we all carry within us a submerged memory of the time when the giant spiders were lethal, and when the reptiles were the planet's dominant life form. — J.G. Ballard

You kissed me, and I opened my eyes and thought you were Death. You were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I clung to the memory of you because it gave me comfort - the only bit of happiness I had ever had. You were my secret fantasy, my lover. My story ... Lord Death is you, and the woman he stalks ... is me."
"Why have you come," he asked, "when you now know the truth?"
"Because when you saved me, you forged a link between us. I don't believe it will ever break."
"Bella," he whispered, "I couldn't allow you to take your life. Couldn't bear the thought of existing in a world that you did not. — Charlotte Featherstone

These students of mine, like the rest of their generation, were different from mine in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exile in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry. — Azar Nafisi

There is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time like the heartbeat. There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it. That process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn and if we do not somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish. — Ted Hughes

Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in permanent evolution. — Eric Hobsbawm

Love happens only once, what happens after that is just compromise; with your heart and with your life ... — Mehek Bassi

Imagine being just strong enough to remember what life was like, feeling things, your heartbeat, the world around you. And imagine you couldn't have it anymore, couldn't even properly remember it, but there was just enough that some deep part of you knew what you were missing. Wouldn't you do anything to get it back, if it was right there for the taking? Wouldn't you be willing to kill for it? — Apollo Blake

You always know more than you think you know without being aware of it. You always remember best what has hurt most.
Memory is a reflex of the pain. Knowledge is the memory of the pain combined with the unconsciousness which we 'rationalize' via dreams or by means of reading literature. It is impossible to learn from someone else's experience unless we don't assume this experience as our own's, which we can achieve only by living it anew and from scratch. We can not live our lives at someone else's expense. Only life fraught with dangers and risks and lived as your own's deserves its name. Only selfish people do not live their lives as if they do not belong entirely to them. Cowardice equals a life that you refuse to live at its fullest and at its most dangerous. — Martin Walser

Ogden Nash wrote a line that I have always remembered: "The old men know when an old man dies." With the years, that line has become ever more poignant to me. After all, an old person to one who has known him for a long time is not an "old person" but is much more likely to be thought of as the younger person who inhabits our memory, vigorous and vibrant. When an old person dies who has been a part of your life, it is part of your youth that dies. And though you survive yourself, you must watch death take away the world of your youth, little by little. — Isaac Asimov

There were days - she could remember this - when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure. — Elizabeth Strout

There are few greater treasures to be acquired in youth than great poetry-and prose-stored in the memory. At the time one may resent the labor of storing. But they sleep in the memory and awake in later years, illuminated by life and illuminating it. — Richard Livingstone

Thus aged men, full loth and slow, The vanities of life forego, And count their youthful follies o'er, Till Memory lends her light no more. — Walter Scott

And he knew that he would never come again, and that lost magic would not come again. Lost now was all of it-the street, the heat, King's Highway, and Tom the Piper's son, all mixed in with the vast and drowsy murmur of the Fair, and with the sense of absence in the afternoon, and the house that waited, and the child that dreamed. And out of the enchanted wood, that thicket of man's memory, Eugene knew that the dark eye and the quiet face of his friend and brother-poor child, life's stranger, and life's exile, lost like all of us, a cipher in blind mazes, long ago-the lost boy was gone forever, and would not return. — Thomas Wolfe

My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go. This, I thought, must be the kindness that God does for them and for us, since He gives so many infants such a little while to bide with us. — Geraldine Brooks

From that point on, having also added the belief that affirmations really work, not only did my memory continue to improve, but I created affirmations for every area of my life that I wanted to advance I began using affirmations to improve my health, finances, relationships, overall happiness, confidence, as well as any and all beliefs, mindsets and habits that needed an upgrade. Nothing was off limits. There are no limits! — Hal Elrod

LUKE: O, what is life, and what our purpose here?
Are living creatures made for pain and strife,
Do we but walk our days upon the ground
To perish without memory or fame?
If so, what shall we seek whilst we yet like?
Is brave adventure worthy of our time,
Or should we seek the principle of pleasure? — Ian Doescher

For life is experience, and longevity is, in the end, measured by memory, and those with a thousand tales to tell have indeed lived longer than any who embrace the mundane.
-Drizzt Do'Urden — R.A. Salvatore

Well, they did rather detest each other. Not unlike yourself and Mr. Malfoy. And then, your father did something Snape could never forgive." "What?" "He saved his life." "What?" "Yes . . ." said Dumbledore dreamily. "Funny, the way people's minds work, isn't it? Professor Snape couldn't bear being in your father's debt. . . . I do believe he worked so hard to protect you this year because he felt that would make him and your father even. Then he could go back to hating your father's memory in peace. . — J.K. Rowling

The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke; it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months. — Giacomo Casanova

For life has worn me down: continual uneasiness, concealment of my knowledge, pretense, fear, a painful straining of all my nerves - not to let down, not to ring out ... and even to this day I still feel an ache in that part of my memory where the very beginning of this effort is recorded, that is, the occasion when I first understood that things which to me had seemed natural were actually forbidden, impossible, that any thought of them was criminal. — Vladimir Nabokov

When you can see your life in retrospect, the romanticism of how good things once were gives way to the reality that positives and negatives comprise every day and every decade. (235) — Victoria Moran

In [man's] mouth is ever the bittersweet taste of life and death, unknown to the trees. Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses, memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he can never tell. — Hope Mirrlees

I have occupied this idle, empty winter with writing a story. It has been written to please myself, without thought of my own vanity or modesty, without regard for other people's feelings, without considering whether I shock or hurt the living, without scrupling to speak of the dead.

The world, I know, is changing. I am not indifferent to the revolution that has caught us in its mighty skirts, to the enormity of the flood that is threatening to submerge us. But what could I do? In the welter of the surrounding storm, I have taken refuge for a moment on this little raft, constructed with the salvage of my memory. I have tried to steer it into that calm haven of art in which I still believe. I have tried to avoid some of the rocks and sandbanks that guard its entrance.

[from the introduction] — Dorothy Bussy

Memory is a capricious and arbitrary creature. You never can tell what pebble she will pick up from the shore of life to keep among her treasures, or what inconspicuous flower of the field she will preserve as the symbol of "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." ... And yet I do not doubt that the most Important things are always the best remembered. — Henry Van Dyke

Beneath history, memory and forgetting
Beneath memory and forgetting, life. — Paul Ricoeur

When a child speaks of a past life memory, the effects ripple far. At the center is the child, who is directly healed and changed. The parents standing close by are rocked by the truth of the experience - a truth powerful enough to dislodge deeply entrenched beliefs. For observers removed from the actual event - even those just reading about it - reports of a child's past life memory can jostle the soul toward new understanding. Children's past life memories have the power to change lives. — Carol Bowman

I do not think there is a person in this world who has been a more ardent admirer of him than I have been. His life and work have been an inspiration to the whole earth, shedding light in the dark places which so sadly needed light. His memory calls forth my most sincere homage, love, and esteem.

{Burbank on the great Robert Ingersoll, whom he admired so much that he requested Ingersoll's eulogy for his brother, Ebon Ingersoll, to be read at his own funeral} — Luther Burbank

I come, O Lord, unto Thy sanctuary to see the life and food of my soul. As I hope in Thee, O Lord, inspire me with that confidence which brings me to Thy holy mountain. Permit me, Divine Jesus, to come closer to Thee, that my whole soul may do homage to the greatness of Thy majesty; that my heart, with its tenderest affections, may acknowledge Thine infinite love; that my memory may dwell on the admirable mysteries here renewed every day, and that the sacrifice of my whole being may accompany Thine. — Clare Of Assisi

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life. — Milan Kundera

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory
meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion
is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw. — William Maxwell

Life attacks us like a blind beast. It swallows up time, the years of our life, it passes like a typhoon and leaves nothing behind. Not even memory, because memory is made of the same swift, ungraspable substance out of which illusions emerge and then disappear. — Alvaro Mutis

My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important. — Mary E. Pearson

Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage! — Hilary Mantel

People are always doing studies. Now there's one that says drinking coffee can lead to the prevention of memory loss in old age. This is terrible news. Drinking coffee is my greatest pleasure in life. That, and forgetting. — Ariel Leve

I was blessed with another trait I inherited from my mother, her ability to forget the pain in life. I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don't hold onto the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new. If you think too much about the ass kicking your mom gave you or the ass kicking that life gave you, you'll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. It's better to take it, spend some time crying, then wake up the next day and move on. You'll have a few bruises and they'll remind you of what happened and that's ok. But after a while, the bruises fade and they fade for a reason. Because now, it's time to get up to some shit again. — Trevor Noah

Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us - grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one's own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another. * * * P — Susan Sontag

If there is anything certain in life, it is this. Time doesn't always heal. Not really. I know they say it does, but that is not true. What time does is to trick you into believing that you have healed, that the hurt of a great loss has lessened. But a single word, a note of a song, a fragrance, a knife point of dawn light across an empty room, any one of these things will take you back to that one moment you have never truly forgotten. These small things are the agents of memory. They are the sharp needle points piercing the living fabric of your life.

Life, my children, isn't linear where the heart is concerned. It is filled with invisible threads that reach out from your past and into your future. These threads connect every second we have lived and breathed. As your own lives move forward and as the decades pass, the more of these threads are cast. Your task is to weave them into a tapestry, one that tells the story of the time we shared. — Stephen Lee

I've always been someone who's really tried to live in the here and now. My memory isn't very good so maybe that's why, but it just seems like I've been living this life, my current chapter, for a really long time and I don't really remember what it was like before. It's just been sort of ingrained in me. What I deal with day to day. — Jude Law

Memory, that library of the soul from which I will draw knowledge and experience for the rest of my life. — Tove Ditlevsen

Living in the moment works sometimes, but when alone, it clouds over your memories and dreams, and those are what I need to survive. — D.S. Mixell

When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you're using sense memory to do a scene - if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears. — Jeffrey Eugenides

That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on. — Dean Koontz

Jack, who apparently always had to be moving in some way, had made up for the missing knife by grabbing a half loaf of French bread and methodically ripping it into tiny pieces.
"What," I said, narrowing my eyes. "Why don't faeries like bread?"
"Hmm?" Jack looked up, then shrugged. "I dunno."
Lend picked up a piece, crumbling it. "My dad said he thought it was because it was the staff of life for people."
"Nasty stuff tastes like mold," Jack said. "I tried a piece once a while ago when I was still trying to force myself to eat normal food so I could stay here. It was like a shock to my whole system." He shuddered at the memory. — Kiersten White

when we have no memory or little imagination of an alternative to a life centered on work, there are few incentives to reflect on why we work as we do and what we might wish to do instead. — Kathi Weeks

We lose track of everything, and of everyone, even ourselves. The facts of my father's life are less known to me than those of the life of Hadrian. My own existence, if I had to write of it, would be reconstructed by me from externals, laboriously, as if it were the life of someone else: I should have to turn to letters, and to the recollections of others, in order to clarify such uncertain memories. What is ever left but crumbled walls, or masses of shade? — Marguerite Yourcenar

Every man's heart one day beats its final beat. His lungs breathe their final breath. And, if what that man did in his life makes the blood pulse through the body of others, and makes them believe deeper in something larger than life, then his essence, his spirit, will be immortalized. By the storytellers, by the loyalty, by the memory of those who honor him, and make the running the man did live forever. — Warrior

Where hard life makes some maudlin to the point of weeping at mere memory, it grants others a curious immunity to suffering. Like the slaves who work the charcoal pits, their skin grows hardened to the pinch of fire and coals, insensible to burning things. — R. Scott Bakker

It was one of those rare times of shared happiness, of perfect contentment. We had a feeling of expectation, that what was already wonderful would only get better and better as time went on. These moments are one of the rarest, most fragile things in the world. You have to seize the day; you have to recall all the rotten, dirty things you endured to earn this peace. You have to remember to enjoy each minute, each hour, because although you may feel like it's going to last forever, the world plans otherwise. You want to be grateful for every precious second, but you simply can't do it. It's not in human nature to live life to the fullest. Haven't your ever noticed that equal amounts of pain and joy are not, in fact, equal in duration? Pain drags on until you wonder if life will ever be bearable again; pleasure, though, once it's reached its peak, fades faster than a trodden gardenia, and your memory searches in vain for the sweet scent. — George Alec Effinger

Love's arms were wreathed about the neck of Hope,
And Hope kiss'd Love, and Love drew in her breath
In that close kiss and drank her whisper'd tales.
They said that Love would die when Hope was gone.
And Love mourn'd long, and sorrow'd after Hope;
At last she sought out Memory, and they trod
The same old paths where Love had walked with Hope,
And Memory fed the soul of Love with tears. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

Sometimes a story just needs an ending, and I used to not be a creative enough person to think of an ending to a romantic story that isn't a wedding or a death. This story didn't end in fireworks, because the truth is, fireworks are something from my twenties. I could have made fireworks, but I chose to make a nuanced memory of a person who is neither a hero nor a villain in my life. All I had to do now was move on. — Mindy Kaling

Memory and hope constantly incite us to the extensions of the self which play so large a part in our daily life. — Josiah Royce

when what she needed was something concrete, some small final memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her - sightless now, stumbling - through this sudden desert of existence which stretched before her from the present moment until the end of life. — Donna Tartt

But luck can be spent, like money; and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life. If — Catherynne M Valente

In the end, the only events of my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world erupted into this transitory one All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings But my encounters with the 'other' reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved on my memory. In that realm there has always been wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost importance by comparison. — Carl Jung

Like the tender fire of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy. — James Joyce

Perhaps my sense of reality is not very highly developed, perhaps I lack a sound and reassuring instinct for the solid facts of our earthly existence; I can't always tell memories from dreams, and often I mistake dreams, coming to life again in colours, smells, sudden associations, with the eerie secret certainty of a past life from which time and space divide me no differently and no better than a light sleep in the early hours. — Annemarie Schwarzenbach

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

The Doctor had a remarkable memory. The problem was, there was so much of it. He had lived eleven lives (or more: there was another life, was there not, that he tried his best never to think about) and he had a different way of remembering things in each life.
The worst part of being however old he was (and he had long since abandoned trying to keep track of it in any way that mattered to anybody but him) was that sometimes things didn't arrive in his head quite when they were meant to. — Neil Gaiman

You see heaven isn't some place that we go to when we die. It's that split second in life where you actually feel alive, and until the end of time, we chase the memory of that, hoping the future holds something better than the past. — Eyedea

In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life. — James Weldon Johnson

There are places in life that seep into your soul, becoming forever a part of it. You need encounter such places only once for your life to be unsuspectingly, and perhaps subtly, altered. Profound conversations and transcendental decisions are found in such places, moments forever inhabiting the deepest corners of memory: a bench in a remote park, a dark street corner, a small plaza, a doorstep. They are there, these places, in the soul, to be called up when one's ability to carry on, to persevere, is tested. — Jaume Sanllorente

He believed that life gives us all a few moments of happiness. For some they last hours or days, for a few lucky ones they last for years. The memories from those moments stays with us forever and turns into a country of memory to which we try to go back for the rest of our lives without ever being able to — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

If what that man did in his life, makes the blood pulse through the body of others, and makes them believe deeper in something larger than life, then his essence, his spirit, will be immortalized by the storytellers, by the loyalty, by the memory, of those who honor him and make whatever the man did live forever. — The Ultimate Warrior

All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead. — C.S. Lewis

As she recited the names and facts, she was recovering not only her memory but also her personality, her desires, her way of seeing life. The idea of suicide, which that morning seemed to be buried beneath several layers of sedatives, resurfaced. — Paulo Coelho

Ahead of me lies the familiar litany: weakening of the heart, hardening of the arteries, increasing brittleness of bones, decreases in kidney filtration rates, lower resistance of the immune system, and loss of memory. The list could be extended almost indefinitely. Evolution seems indeed to have arranged things so that all our systems deteriorate, and that we invest in repair only as much as we are worth. — Jared Diamond

Yet the timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness, And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream. And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space. Who among you does not feel that his power to love is boundless? And yet who does not feel that very love, though boundless, encompassed within the centre of his being, and moving not from love thought to love thought, nor from love deeds to other love deeds? And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless? — Khalil Gibran

So - people a thousand years from now ... This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying. — Thornton Wilder

This too shall pass. Life has a way of going on, and you do your best to move with it. A broken heart heals. Like every wound, there's a scar, a memory, but it fades. Finally you realize that an hour has passed without your thinking about it, then a day ... — Kristin Hannah

The fact is, we do not learn how to think. Schools impart to us, ever more zealously, knowledge of which we can use only the smallest part; it burdens our memory, and only tempers our intelligence with a commonplace logic, which one would think ought to equip us for the struggle of life. This hot-house culture does not form our judgment; on the contrary, it troubles it by giving us ready-made opinions to digest, without teaching us to appreciate their accuracy. — Dr. PAUL DEBOIS