Terrible Memory Quotes & Sayings

My dad took me for an audition once, to show me, 'OK, you want to be a child actor, this is what it's like.' I sang a folk song about donkeys on this West End stage with this big director, and there was a queue of 200 girls all singing 'Memory.' I was terrible. Terrible. — Emilia Clarke

In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure ... — Madeleine L'Engle

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

In Australia and New Zealand, and New Zealand especially, I always find everyone is so nice and friendly. It's one of the few places that I remember visually, like I remember where I stayed and my surroundings - and that's a good sign, because I've got a terrible memory. I'm looking forward to it! — Ellie Goulding

Our enemies ... seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him. — Cormac McCarthy

I have a terrible memory. — Dorothy Allison

The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. — John Green

I have terrible short-term memory loss, which I like to think of as Presidential eligibility. — Paula Poundstone

Memory is a slippery thing. When something terrible happens to you, like the loss of someone you love ... memory can turn into a soft blanket that hides you from the loss. — Kathi Appelt

Rain was falling, quiet rain, penetrating, like thick fog. You know, the terrible rain that rubs out the hours, that lies outside of time, in the eternity of sadness that no longer dares to name itself, autumn rain that erases even the memory of a possible return of summer. It was raining like that. — Marie Bronsard

Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something so slack and almost fearful in her too frequent smile, so that when you saw Mignon being happy, you always thought: "It can't last." She had the febrile gaiety of a being without a past, without a present, yet she existed thus, without memory or history, only because her past was too bleak to think of and her future too terrible to contemplate; she was the broken blossom of the present tense. — Angela Carter

Now that so many years have passed, now that I remember with the benefit of an understanding I didn't then have, I think of that conversation and it seems implausible that its importance didn't hit me in the face. (And I tell myself at the same time that we're terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn't actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read). — Juan Gabriel Vasquez

People seemed to have two different selves - an experiencing self who endures every moment equally and a remembering self who gives almost all the weight of judgment afterward to two single points in time, the worst moment and the last one. The remembering self seems to stick to the Peak-End rule even when the ending is an anomaly. Just a few minutes without pain at the end of their medical procedure dramatically reduced patients' overall pain ratings even after they'd experienced more than half an hour of high level of pain. "That wasn't so terrible," they'd reported afterward. A bad ending skewed the pain scores upward just as dramatically. — Atul Gawande

Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent, blood-stained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves there with terrible distinctness. He winced at the memory of all that he had suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for Basil Hallward that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair came back to him, and he grew cold with passion. The dead man was still sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now. How horrible that was! Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day. — Oscar Wilde

I have a terrible memory in general, but one thing I've always been able to remember is my songs. — Conor Oberst

I have a terrible memory of my own past. I can barely remember my childhood. I have few memories from college and law school - though once I got married, I got the advantage of being able to consult my husband's memory. — Gretchen Rubin

I can never remember names. I'm so self-centered and have a terrible memory ... — Jim Shaw

Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers - their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges - But he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight - — Joyce Carol Oates

Imagine the literary buff, steeped in his beloved classics, rejoicing in a memory that sings, prepared to dispense kilowatts of goodwill, who fetches up at the Odeon on an off day. There are days like that, when everything rings hollow, and even the hollowness is unconvincing. There's nothing to be done about it: the inspiration's not there. He's left with a terrible sense of disappointment, resentment, against whom he doesn't exactly know: the playwright or the actors? All he can do is curl up in bed, alone, all alone, and console himself with suitably wrought alexandrines. — Jacques Yonnet

The terrible thing is that it's impossible to tear the past out by the roots. Impossible to tear it out, but possible to hide the memory of it. — Leo Tolstoy

Porter Rockwell was that most terrible instrument that can be handled by fanaticism; a powerful physical nature welded to a mind of very narrow perceptions, intense convictions, and changeless tenacity. In his build he was a gladiator; in his humor a Yankee lumberman; in his memory a Bourbon; in his vengeance an Indian. A strange mixture, only to be found on the American continent — Fitz Hugh Ludlow

It is said that time heals everything. I don't think that's true. As the years have gone by, I've found it odd how simple things can still remind you of those terrible times or how the moment you try so hard to forget becomes your sharpest memory. — Amita Trasi

I didn't know if his art was helping. But Moses's pictures were like that, glorious and terrible. Glorious because they brought memory to life, terrible for the same reason.
Time softens memories, sanding down the rough edges of death.
But Moses's pictures dripped with life and reminded us of our loss. — Amy Harmon

It's easy to write one's memoirs when one has a terrible memory. — Arthur Schnitzler

It will be difficult to return to racing this weekend after Marco's terrible accident in Sepang but I think it is the best thing we can do to honour him, says World Champ Casey Stoner. We know we all play a risky game and, even if compared to the past the safety of our sport is much better, unfortunately these kind of events still occur. We will go out there this weekend and try to put on a good show for all the fans and especially in memory of Marco. — Casey Stoner

This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with its beautiful stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth
a world which now trembles before the King In Yellow. — Robert W. Chambers

The memory of sustenance is a terrible thing. Far worse, I think, than actual starving. Starving just kills you. Longing can gnaw away at you forever. — Terri Cheney

There must be a solemn and terrible aloneness that comes over the child as he takes those first independent steps. All this is lost to memory and we can only reconstruct it through analogies in later life ... To the child who takes his first steps and finds himself walking alone, this moment must bring the first sharp sense of the uniqueness and separateness of his body and his person, the discovery of the solitary self. — Selma Fraiberg

Jehanne said that it would always be like this. That I would always be young and beautiful in her memory, and she in mine. That I would never grow resentful, never be tempted to betray her. That she would never grow restless and fickle, and see to replace me. So you see, not exactly the sentiments of a great and terrible love affair. — Jacqueline Carey

And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, is that if something happened to one of us
excuse me for saying this
but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. — Raymond Carver

Lo- don't move," he says, seriously, his eyes like honey in the basement light- warm and amber and shining. "i'm still working."
"I had an itch."
"Let me know next time, and I'll scratch it for you. Before the terrible itching incident ruined everything, I was about to start on the dark shadow of your elbow crease. Now I'll have to re-create that perfect, dark, little cityscape from memory. — Kate Ellison

You see, Minka, my father would say. Anything is possible. Even the most terrible beast might one day be a distant memory. He would hold my hand in his, tracing my finger along the brightest stars in the constellation. Look, he would say. There is the head, and the tail. There's the heart. — Jodi Picoult

convocation. 'Impossibility is an inherent part of nature, an ancient beast. It instils fear in your heart. Yet, you have to accept it, embrace it. It'll be a terrible experience, mind you. But you need to bear it and then forget it. Just put a number on that piece of memory and lock it in a closet inside your mind. What's that number, you might ask. Well, it's the probability. Of you succeeding, against all odds. And it will be low, very low. That's why you need to hide it from your eyes. Just remember that your probability of succeeding is never zero. Once you have done that, use every quantum of energy available in your body to achieve what people so fondly call as the impossible. You can do it. I know that. And the day you do, you'll realize that the number didn't matter at all. — Uday Satpathy

But the involuntary tricks of memory and the voluntary ones of imagination make always such terrible havoc of facts that truth, be it ever so much sought and cared for, appears in history and biography only in a more or less disfigured condition. — Frederick Niecks

But writing is a wonderful and terrible thing. It opens deep wells of memory that were previously capped. — Stephen King

I have a terrible memory because I'm not interested in the past. It's done, it's done. — Harold Prince

Ut when one human creature dies a whole world of hope and memory and feeling dies with him. To be robbed of the dignity of a natural death is a terrible deprivation. — Robertson Davies

What frightens you?
What makes the hair on your arms rise, your palms sweat, the breath catch in your chest like a wild thing caged?
Is it the dark? A fleeting memory of a bedtime story, ghosts and goblins and witches hiding in the shadows? Is it the way the wind picks up just before a storm, the hint of wet in the air that makes you want to scurry home to the safety of your fire?
Or is it something deeper, something much more frightening, a monster deep inside that you've glimpsed only in pieces, the vast unknown of your own soul where secrets gather with a terrible power, the dark inside? — Libba Bray

If you ask my wife, the biggest fault is my inability around the house. She says the only thing handy about me is that I'm close by. And, I have a terrible memory. I'm bad at saying no. I often double-book. There are a lot of things. — Hugh Jackman

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

Still, I'm not convinced that you were right, Dai
that it's such a bad thing, a useless enterprise to reel and reel out my memory at night. Some part of me, the human part of me, is kept alive by this, I think. Like water flushing a wound, to prevent it from closing. I am a lucky one, like Chiyo says. I made a terrible mistake. In Gifu, in my raggedy clothes, I had an unreckonable power. I didn't know it at the time. But when I return to the stairwell now, I can feel them webbing around me: my choices, their infinite variety, spiraling out of my hands, my invisible thread. Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose. It's become my sanctuary here in Nowhere Mill. A threshold where I still exist. — Karen Russell

I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously ... And now I seek my hatred and cannot seem to find it. I feel its flame going out as I come to understand [its] existence ... It would be difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite. I have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply fill these pages ... — Isabel Allende

I have a terrible memory; I never forget a thing. — Edith Konecky

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

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

Combat is fast, unfair, cruel, and dirty. It is meant to be that way so that the terrible experience is branded into the memory of those who are fortunate enough to survive. It is up to those survivors to ensure that the experience is recorded and passed along to those who just might want to try it. — Bruce H. Norton

If we say that monsters [people who do terrible evil] are beyond forgiving, we give them a power they should never have ... they are given the power to keep their evil alive in the hearts of those who suffered most. We give them power to condemn their victims to live forever with the hurting memory of their painful pasts. We give the monsters the last word. — Lewis B. Smedes

It is the writer's duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader's civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one's eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who have perished. — Vasily Grossman

And the purple parted before it, snapping back like skin after a slash, and what it let out wasn't blood but light: amazing orange light that filled her heart and mind with a terrible mixture of joy, terror, and sorrow. No wonder she had repressed this memory all these years. It was too much. Far too much. The light seemed to give the fading air of evening a silken texture, and the cry of a bird struck her ear like a pebble made of glass. A cap of breeze filled her nostrils with a hundred exotic perfumes: frangipani, bougainvillea, dusty roses, and oh dear God, night-blooming cereus ... And rising above one horizon came the orange mansion of the moon, bloated and burning cold, while the sun sank below the other, boiling in a crimson house of fire. She thought that mixture of furious light would kill her with its beauty. — Stephen King

Thank you very much," the girl said. "You know that another woman, or a woman in memory, is a terrible thing for a young girl to deal with when she is still without experience. — Ernest Hemingway,

Those who did remember probably shrugged off the chill of her memory, turned their heads down to the sports page or up toward the approaching bus. The world is a terrible place, they thought. Bad things happen every day. My bus is late. — Dennis Lehane

Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

My mother, who died aged 82, had Alzheimer's. Losing your memory is bad enough, but everything shuts down. You can't remember how to eat or go to the toilet. It's a terrible disease and so distressing to watch it take over someone you love. — Bonnie Tyler

Our crimes, for which we are responsible: as taxpayers, for failing to provide massive reparations, for granting refuge and immunity to the perpetrators, and for allowing the terrible facts to be sunk deep in the memory hole. All of this is of great significance, as it has been in the past. — Noam Chomsky

Duty o'er love was the choice you did make
My love you did spurn, my heart you did break
Your penance to pay, no pride you shall gain
Three sons on three sons find nothing but pain
I gift you my powers in memory of me
The joy of love no son shall ever see
When a Lifemate is chosen by the heart of a son
No protection can be given, again I have won
His pain will be deep, her death will be swift
Inside his heart a terrible rift
Only freely given will this curse be done
To break the spell, three must work as one. — Cherry Adair

To be honest, and all the external influences aside, there are some parts of this that I remember in great, terrible detail, so much so I fear getting lost in the labyrinth of memory. There are other parts of this that remain as unclear and unknowable as someone else's mind, and I fear that in my head I've likely conflated and compressed timelines and events. — Paul Tremblay

Somewhere at the back of my head I heard a click, tiny and irrevocable. Memory magnifies it to a wrenching, echoing crack, but the truth is that it was the very smallness that made it so terrible. — Tana French

I digress, but here's the rub: The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint. Your Hazel is alive, Waters, and you mustn't impose your will upon another's decision, particularly a decision arrived at thoughtfully. She wishes to spare you pain, and you should let her. You may not find young Hazel's logic persuasive, but I have trod through this vale of tears longer than you, and from where I'm sitting, she's not a lunatic. — John Green

So the next time you doubt the strangeness of the future, remember how you were born in a hunter-gatherer tribe ten thousand years ago, when no one knew of Science at all. Remember how you were shocked, to the depths of your being, when Science explained the great and terrible sacred mysteries that you once revered so highly. Remember how you once believed that you could fly by eating the right mushrooms, and then you accepted with disappointment that you would never fly, and then you flew. Remember how you had always thought that slavery was right and proper, and then you changed your mind. Don't imagine how you could have predicted the change, for that is amnesia. Remember that, in fact, you did not guess. Remember how, century after century, the world changed in ways you did not guess.
Maybe then you will be less shocked by what happens next. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

I don't know when love became elusive
what i know, is that no one i know has it
my fathers arms around my mothers neck
fruit too ripe to eat, a door half way open
when your name is a just a hand i can never hold
everything i have ever believed in, becomes magic.
i think of lovers as trees, growing to and
from one another searching for the same light,
my mothers laughter in a dark room,
a photograph greying under my touch,
this is all i know how to do, carry loss around until
i begin to resemble every bad memory,
every terrible fear,
every nightmare anyone has ever had.
i ask did you ever love me?
you say of course, of course so quickly
that you sound like someone else
i ask are you made of steel? are you made of iron?
you cry on the phone, my stomach hurts
i let you leave, i need someone who knows how to stay. — Warsan Shire

A list of names will follow. If I've missed anyone obvious, it's either a) because of my terrible memory or b) because your contribution wasn't as great as you thought it was. — John C. Parkin

Empowering process. But if you are in a compulsive cycle of reactivity, memory distorts your perception of the present, and your thoughts, emotions, and actions become disproportionate to the stimulus. The choice is always before you: to respond consciously to the present; or to react compulsively to it. There is a vast difference between the two. And it can make the world of a difference. If terrible things have happened to you, you ought to have grown wise. If the worst possible events have befallen. — Sadhguru

I've got a terrible memory; it's probably because I'm always concentrating on what I'm doing now. — Vivienne Westwood

I think 90% of my ideas evaporate because I have a terrible memory and because I seem to be committed to not scribble anything down. As soon as I write it down, my mind rejects it. — Junot Diaz

He was searching his memory when suddenly a strange figure appeared in front of them, on horseback, trotted for a moment, then turned round in the saddle. His blood froze; he remained rooted to the spot in horror. That equivocal, sexless face was green, with terrible eyes of an icy light blue beneath purple lids; postules encircled its mouth; extraordinarily thin arms, bare from the elbows down and shaking with fever, emerged from ragged sleeves, and the fleshless thighs shivered in high boots which were far too large.
The dreadful gaze was fixed on Des Esseintes, boring into him, chilling him to the marrow, while the bulldog woman, now in even greater panic, clung to him with her head thrown back on her rigid neck, screaming blue murder. And instantly he grasped the meaning of the horrifying vision. He was looking at the figure of the Pox. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

But that age ... exerts on us
An almost terrible charm,
Like the memory of things seen
And a life lived in dreams. — Heinrich Heine

Artham felt lighter and stronger, and for the first time in nine years, his mind was clear and sure. The words to a hundred of his own poems scrolled across his memory; he saw faces of old friends, battles he had fought, and even the most terrible moments of his life - and yet he remained himself. The wild animal inside that he had struggled so long to kill pulsed with power, but it was no longer his master. He rode the pain like a knight rides a horse. ...
Artham's eyes watered from the wind and from the speed and from the magnificent beauty of the land arrayed below him. Water streaked from the corners of his eyes ... and , in the vicious cold froze into silvery jewels.
He would have to write a poem about this. — Andrew Peterson

Alzheimer's is a horrible thing. Some people are naive about it. They think, 'Oh it's just your memory,' but my mother was in terrible pain. Your body closes down. She didn't know if she'd eaten or if she wanted to eat. She couldn't remember how to walk. Towards the end, she didn't know us. It came gradually, then it got worse. — Bonnie Tyler

Mearth appeared angry and disappointed briefly, but then she just gazed at the ground. " ... It must be horrible, feeling all alone, is it?" she asked.
"Oh, not really," said Alecto, his eyes lifeless, his voice listless. "I'm going to be forgotten by someone who I can't forget, though. That will be terrible ... but maybe it's better if she does forget me altogether. — Rebecca McNutt

The public has a short memory. That's why all these big stars do these crazy, terrible things and two years later they're back in the biz, you know. 'Cause the public has a short memory. Let me give you a little test, okay? This is my thesis
the public has a short memory and, like
How many people remember, a couple of years ago, when the Earth blew up? How many people? See? So few people remember. And you would think that something like that, people would remember. But NOOO! You don't remember that? The Earth blew up and was completely destroyed? And we escaped to this planet on the giant Space Ark? Where have you people been? And the government decided not to tell the stupider people 'cause they thought that it might affect
[dawning realization, looks around] Ohhhh! Okay! Uh, let's move on! — Steve Martin

Could there be anything more sad and more lonely than remembering what terrible things the future will bring? — Stefan Merrill Block

Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret. — Richard Dawkins

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama. — Adrienne Rich

The wasteland that is your memory now comes under the absolute dictatorship of idols too terrible to mention. — Jack Henry Abbott

Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all.It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world. — Donna Tartt