Memory Jokes Quotes & Sayings

In Memory of M. B.

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and stayed with her alone.
Now you're gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain. — Anna Akhmatova

The right honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the house where I grew up even though I have not been inside it for decades ... I want to be able to walk through the house of my own life until my life is done. I want to hold on to who and what I have been even as both become somehow inevitably less. — Anna Quindlen

And so he poured himself with renewed determination into her arms, into her conversations, into her fears and jokes and stories, hoping that this intimacy would finally smother all memory of Amy Mulvaney. — Richard Flanagan

He was like the Great Santini of the Strand. Few people could take him on; he was so well-read and had a memory that could retain every detail of everything he'd ever read, as well as jokes, lyrics, arias, names of store owners he'd met on his honeymoon in Paris, names of restaurants where gangsters were gunned down in 1924. He could quote lines from books he disliked better than you could quote lines from what you claimed was your favorite book of all time. — Jeanne Darst

What's so funny?" Bella mumbled.
"I got food in her hair," I told her, chortling again.
"I'm not going to forget this, dog," Rosalie hissed.
"S'not so hard to erase a blond's memory," I countered. "Just blow in her ear."
Get some new jokes, "Rosalie snapped. — Stephenie Meyer

I have about 1,000 hours of myself on tape in a vault in Los Angeles. But I also have a photographic memory about my jokes, because they're really about me; they're my stories. — Louie Anderson

Sure I do a lot of jokes about Anne Frank. But when you do those jokes, it makes people remember what happened to her. That process of bringing her story back doesn't have to be a serious one. What I say is all nonsense, but it helps to keep her memory alive. — Joan Rivers

The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt ... The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the memory loses power. Over time you become someone else. — Rebecca Solnit