Things Or Memories Quotes & Sayings

In an instant, our mind can carry us far away into memories of the past or fantasies about the future. Or we may get caught up in a race against the clock, feeling like there's never enough time. We say things like "Time is flying," "Time is running out," or "There are never enough hours in the day." — Deepak Chopra

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

Should at that moment the full moon Step forth upon the hill, And memories hard to bear at noon, By moonlight harder still, Form in the shadows of the trees,
Things that you could not spare And live, or so you thought, yet these All gone, and you still there, A man no longer what he was, Not yet the thing he planned ... — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Everything has a past, a voice, existed at some point, even things as small and seemingly meaningless as a house in a huge suburb. It's a house like every other house ... but at some point a family lived there, made it theirs, made it important. When people forget that history, that somebody at some point thought the house mattered, it just becomes an empty pile of nailed wood and brick and concrete that gets torn down for some strip mall or chain store to take its place ... and that's what happens more and more now, everything is disposable, always replaced with no thought at all. That's where things get lost, memories get lost, humanity slips through the cracks, because when we all fail to pay attention to the things that make up our lives, we're no longer human at all, not really. — Rebecca McNutt

For there were times I caught them staring at me curiously. I never told them about my past or shared personal information. They knew nothing of Savannah or my dad or my friendship with Tony. Those memories were mine and mine alone, for I'd learned that some things are best kept secret. In — Nicholas Sparks

So what were you doing there?"

Here's the frustrating thing about Nate, one of those things that happy memories conveniently glossed over. A lot of times, you had to ask him a question more than once to get a straight answer. He loved to answer questions you'd never asked, or to answer a question with another question.

"Do I really have to answer that, Kyrie?"

See?

"Don't you trust me?"

See?! — Genevieve Pearson

The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about. I myself can only wish that my stories were, indeed, nothing but incredible fabrications. I have stayed alive all these years clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion. I have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. But each time I tried to push them into the dark, they came back stronger and more vivid than ever. Like cancer cells, these memories have taken root in my mind and eaten into my flesh. — Haruki Murakami

Memory: what wonders it performs in preserving and storing up things gone by - or rather, things that are — Plutarch

When you sleep your eyes move left and right and physical movement takes trauma and moves it from your frontal lobe to the back of your brain or to another part of the brain where you can store it that memory but when you think about those things that happened, you don't associate the feeling that normally comes with it. So the problem is if you have something traumatic happen and you are not getting a good amount of rest, it will stay in your frontal lobe. — Matty Mullins

I was left an orphan while I was still a child, and we were very poor. Sometimes I would stand for hours on end in ecstasy outside a baker's shop, gazing with burning desire at the cakes. I would say to myself, 'These are not for me. I shall never be able to eat anything like this.' The Bible brings back these memories. Once again I can see wonderful things, but I know that they are not for me, because I am a Jew. I know that there are Jews who have converted to Christianity in order to marry Romanian girls or to escape anti-Semitic persecution. But I have not yet met a Jew who believes in Jesus. — Richard Wurmbrand

The sea can bind us to her many moods, whispering to us by the subtle token of a shadow or a gleam upon the waves, and hinting in these ways of her mournfulness or rejoicing. Always she is remembering old things, and these memories, though we may not grasp them, are imparted to us, so that we share her gaiety or remorse. — H.P. Lovecraft

Suddenly, all I can think about are all the things I don't know about him. All the things I never had time to learn. I don't know if his feet are ticklish or how long his toes are. I don't know what nightmares he had as a child. I don't know which stars are his favorites, what shapes he sees in the clouds. I don't know what he is truly afraid of or what memories he holds closest.
And I don't have enough time now, never enough time. I want to be in the moment with him, feel his body against mine and think of nothing else, but my mind explodes with grief for all that I am missing. All that I will miss. All that I have wasted. — Carrie Ryan

Upstairs, in the cupboard, he had a box of things he had saved as a boy and a young man. He hadn't looked into it in twenty years or more. Nothing fancy or valuable, but things that had meant something to him at one time. He found it, and found the key, and carried it downstairs without opening it. — Jane Smiley

I think we need to be put back in touch with our childhood ... to be reminded of what's important, like memories about people we loved, or things that happened to us that affected our lives, things we can laugh about and shed a few tears about ... I think storytelling is a way of saying 'I love you. I love you enough to tell you something that means a great deal to me.' — Kathryn Tucker Windham

But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play
I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. Browning writes about that somewhere; but our own senses will imagine them for us. There are moments when the odour of lilas blanc passes suddenly across me, and I have to live the strangest month of my life over again. — Oscar Wilde

We are the sum total of our memories. Memories are the most precious things we have. Good or bad. That's what make us who we are. What would we be without them? — Alexandra Potter

Photography has definitely been my favorite way to remember things. At least for me that's how my brain processes things, of memories or moments - if I take a picture of it I can remember so many more details. I think it's about choosing the exact picture in my head that signifies or symbolizes a moment - almost as if you're using film. It's almost archaic. — Dianna Agron

She was a woman who made mistakes, who sometimes cried on a Monday morning or at night alone in bed. She was a woman who often became bored with her life and found it hard to get up for work in the morning. She was a woman who more often than not had a bad hair day, who looked in the mirror and wondered why she couldn't just drag herself to the gym more often; she was a woman who sometimes questioned what reason had she to live on this planet. She was a woman who sometimes just got things wrong.
On the other hand, she was a woman with a million happy memories, who knew what it was like to experience true love and who was ready to experience more life, more love and make new memories. — Cecelia Ahern

To bury something, it is often considered, either means the end of something or the passing on into the realm of the earth or the sky, only the dead could ever know. But it is not only the dead that we bury. We bury objects, memories, thoughts and emotions among other things. Contrary to popular belief burying something is not the end of it because even though it is suppressed beneath layers of earth or self control, the dead and buried don't always remain that way and that is where the stories come from, the stories that haunt us for the rest of our no longer carefree lives. — Shitij Sharma

As you release the things you no longer love or use, you call back to yourself the parts of your spirit that have been attached to them, and attached to the emotional needs and memories associated with those objects. In so doing, you bring yourself powerfully into present time. Your energy, instead of being dispersed in a thousand different, unproductive directions, becomes more centered and focused. You feel more spiritually complete and more at peace with yourself. — Karen Kingston

The little things we value as mundane or pithy usually turn into the big things in hindsight ... an "I love you" called out as the door closes, a walk around the same block with the same friend, Grandma's chocolate cake every time you visit ... the brush of skin on skin as two loves pause to breath in sync. Life isn't made up of miles, but memories. Cherish them while you're making them, not just after you can't make those memories anymore. — Toni Sorenson

Throughout our times with Christopher [therapist] we were encouraged to work together at communicating on the inside. He pointed out that it would be good for us all to listen-in when an alter was telling his/her story - that it's now safe, no harm will come to us from telling or from knowing. There was once a time when it was very important that we didn't know what had happened; that knowing meant danger or being so overwhelmed with pain and grief that we wouldn't survive. But now it was different. We're safe and strong, and our goal now are to uncover the grisly truth of what's happened to us, so that it's no longer a powerful secret. We can look at it and face the past for what it is - old memories of old events. Today is now,and we can choose to live a different way and believe different things. We were once powerless and vulnerable, but now we were in a position to make choices. We had control over our life. — Carolyn Bramhall

The things that you did with parents, whether it was spending every Sunday morning with your dad and eating French toast and watching Popeye, or decorating the Christmas tree with our mother - these are memories that help you be happy. — Leonardo DiCaprio

If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope some of it might open our eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do. — Anthony Esolen

You gave me my life back. You cared about me enough to push back my demons. You made me want to be with you every minute of the day because you made me feel things that no one else could. And whether you're lying beside me or living in my memories, I will love you. Forever. Always. — Lisa De Jong

Prayers often begin as memories. When we remember those whom we have loved, and miss them, naturally we hope for their safety and their happiness, wherever they might be. That hope turns into a wish, and whenever a wish is voiced, even silently, even without words, it becomes a supplication. Perhaps we don't know to whom we're speaking; perhaps we ask before we truly know who's listening, or before we even believe that listener exists. But I judge it a very fine beginning, to make a practice of remembering those people we have loved. When we remember others fondly, we wish them health and happiness and all good things. — Eleanor Catton

Flesh does strange things to memory. Pain and joy both alter it. When you are happy, you remember things one way. When you are sad, you remember them another. And sometimes the flesh does not admit that memory is real at all or plucks false memories out of thin air. — Tanya Karen Gough

The feelings I thought I had left behind returned when, almost nineteen years later, the Islamic regime would once again turn against its students. This time it would open fire on those it had admitted to the universities, those who were its own children, the children of the revolution. Once more my students would go to the hospitals in search of the murdered bodies that where stolen by the guards and vigilantes and try to prevent them from stealing the wounded.
I would like to know where Mr. Bahri is right now, at this moment, and to ask him: How did it all turn out, Mr. Bahri - was this your dream, your dream of the revolution? Who will pay for all those ghosts in my memories? Who will pay for the snapshots of the murdered and the executed that we hid in our shoes and closets as we moved on to other things? Tell me, Mr. Bahri-or, to use that odd expression of Gatsby's, Tell me, old sport- what shell we do with all this corpses on our hands? — Azar Nafisi

People open shops in order to sell things, they hope to become busy so that they will have to enlarge the shop, then to sell more things, and grow rich, and eventually not have to come into the shop at all. Isn't that true? But are there other people who open a shop with the hope of being sheltered there, among such things as they most value - the yarn or the teacups or the books - and with the idea only of making a comfortable assertion? They will become a part of the block, a part of the street, part of everybody's map of the town, and eventually of everybody's memories. They will sit and drink coffee in the middle of the morning, they will get out the familiar bits of tinsel at Christmas, they will wash the windows in spring before spreading out the new stock. Shops, to these people, are what a cabin in the woods might be to somebody else - a refuge and a justification. — Alice Munro

The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or inspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, if not back to your own neighborhood. To the street where you live. To things you left behind.
And that's what you need, what you needed al along. — Jonathan Lethem

I guess when someone's gone from your life for a while, all you think about are the big things. The big regrets, the could-have, should-haves. Or the big moments, the memories that are going to be with you forever, those life-changing moments, like first kisses and first confessions and first trusts. And you think about the lasts too: the last kiss, the last words, the last moments. — Beth Revis

Our memories and events in our lives are untidy things. We wish that we can file them away and shut the door, or wish the opposite - that they would stay forever. — Deb Caletti

"Horrible things have happened to us, are still happening to us, will happen every day for the rest of our lives, probably. What defines us is not our ability to never let them break us--what defines us is not letting them own us. We are the Thaw, and we will not be defeated by memories or evil men." — Sara Raasch

It is good to come to a country you know practically nothing about. Your thoughts grow still, useless. Everything must be rebuilt. In a country you know nothing about, there is no reference point. You struggle to associate colors, smells, dim memories. You live a little like a child, or an animal. Objects and events may bring things to mind, but in the end they remain no more than what they are in fact. They begin only when you experience them, vanish when others follow. — Andrzej Stasiuk

The thing is, all memory is fiction. You have to remember that. Of course, there are things that actually, certifiably happened, things you can pinpoint the day, the hour, the minute. When you think about it, though, those things, mostly seem to happen to other people.
This story actually happened, and it happened pretty much the way I am going to tell it to you. It's a true story as much as six decades or telling and remembering can allow it to be true. Time changes things, and you don't always get everything right. You remember a little thing clear as a bell, the weather, say, or the splash of light on the river's ripples as the sun was going down into the black pines. things not even connected to anything in particular, while other things, big things even, come completely disconnected and no longer have any shape or sound. The little things seem more real than the big things. — Robert Goolrick

Like the apple bruising Kafka's beetle, each of these pellets of recollection lodged in Moose's flesh, releasing its cargo of memories of all the things he had lost - "Not lost! Gained!" Moose thundered aloud, but now, mercifully, that debate (lost or gained?) was supplanted in his mind by the proximity of Belmont Harbor and the yacht club. Yes, this was the place; Moose eased the station wagon into a parking space, desperate to free himself of its chassis, whose sole purpose, it now seemed, was to hold him still so that these bullets of memory could assault him, enter his flesh and release their shrapnel of foolish and unreliable nostalgia. — Jennifer Egan

The cabins they passed among seemed solemn in their abandonment, cramped by the watercourse and the overhanging brow of the cloudy mountain. Some of its people might yet be living, and Ada wondered how often they remembered this lonesome place, now still as a held breath. Whatever word they had called it would soon be numbered among the names of things which have not been passed down to us and are exiled from our memories. She doubted that its people, even in the last days, had ever looked ahead and imagined loss so total and so soon. they had not foreseen a near time when theirs would be another world filled with other people whose mouths would speak other words, whose sleep would be eased or troubled with other dreams, whose prayers would be offered up to other gods. — Charles Frazier

I see the origin of the irresistible attraction of metaphor and analogy, the explanation of our strange and permanent need to find similarities in things. I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax. — Roger Caillois

Perhaps that's because I do not remember a thing about the shooting. Not a single thing. The doctors and nurses offered complicated explanations for why I didn't recall the attack. They said the brain protects us from memories that are too painful to remember. Or, they said, my brain might have shut down as soon as I was injured. I love science, and I love nothing more than asking question upon question to figure out the way things work. But I don't need science to figure out why I don't remember the attack. I know why: God is kind to me. — Malala Yousafzai

Remembering things or processing memories can be a charged, or frightening, or uncomfortable time. It can help to imagine yourself being a reporter. This can take pressure off of needing to remember 'all the details' or not wanting to 'be wrong about something', if you simply just write down whatever comes to you down on paper without editing it, censoring it, or passing judgment - for the time being - on either its content, or on whether it is l00% accurate in every way. Simply write it down and come back to it later, when things may make more sense, or as additional information comes to you... — A.T.W.

When it seems you are having too much fun, then a switch turns on in your head and makes you think; if only there were a way to take a snapshot of this moment and place it into a mason jar next to some peach preserves. Or, you can just close your eyes and let the joy sink into your psyche. Each, in their own way will last a lifetime." - A.H. Scott 4/29/12 — A.H. Scott

All things are transient. Buddha says it is so, and Hock Seng, who didn't believe in or care about karma or the truths of the dharma when he was young, has come in his old age to understand his grandmother's religion and its painful truths. Suffering is his lot. Attachment is the source of his suffering. And yet he cannot stop himself from saving and preparing and striving to preserve himself in this life which has turned out so poorly.
How is it that I sinned to earn this bitter fate? Saw my clan whittled by red machetes? Saw my businesses burned and my clipper ships sunk? He closes his eyes, forcing memories away. Regret is suffering. — Paolo Bacigalupi

I believe that God will help us to forget things, the memory of which would do us harm, or rather that He will enable us to remember only so much of them as will be for our good, and we, ourselves, not emotionally overwhelmed. The pain endured. The lesson learned. Let it now be forgotten! Face the future with courage, cheerfulness, and hope. Give God the chance and He will make you forget all that it would be harmful to remember. — Bill Vaughan

There either is or is not, that's the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it's red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I'm not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I'm going to tell it the way I remember it. — Charles Dickens

The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn't mean that the story isn't true,
only that I honestly don't know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture. — Karen Joy Fowler

I'm only remembering unnecessary things because I'm alone. — Mika Yamamori

My memories are inside me - they're not things or a place - I can take them anywhere. — Olivia Newton-John

Sometimes I would be very upset because my memories are very murky from my childhood, but there are certain emotional memories or emotional truths that are painful, and things that I know to be the case and I had to nail them down, and that was difficult. — Justin Torres

It was so big, that view. I'll never remember it properly. How can anyone remember something that big? I don't think people's brains are designed for memories like that. They're designed for things like phone numbers, or the color of someone's hair. Not hugeness. — Lucy Christopher

What a strange idea: "comfort food." Isn't every food comforting in its own way! Why are certain foods disqualified? Can't fancy food be soothing in the same way as granny food?" Must it always be about loaded memories, like Proust's madeleine? Or can it be merely quirky, like M. F. K. Fisher's tangerine ritual: she dried them on a radiator, then cooled them on her Paris windowsill.
Comfort food - food that reassures - is dilferent things to different people. — David Tanis

But nothing happened there now of a nature to provoke a disturbance. There were no complaints to the management or the police, and the dark glory of the upper galleries was a legend in such memories as that of the late Emiel Kroger and the present Pablo Gonzales, and one by one, of course, those memories died out and the legend died out with them. Places like the Joy Rio and the legends about them make one more than usually aware of the short bloom and the long fading out of things. ("The Mysteries of the Joy Rio") — Tennessee Williams

In books there were people who were always agreeable or tender, and delighted to do things that made one happy, and who did not show their kindness by finding fault. The world outside the books was not a happy one, Maggie felt: it seemed to be a world where people behaved the best to those they did not pretend to love and that did not belong to them. And if life had no love in it, what else was there for Maggie? Nothing but poverty and the companionship of her mother's narrow griefs - perhaps of her father's heart-cutting childish dependence. There is no hopelessness so sad as that of early youth, when the soul is made up of wants, and has no long memories, no super-added life in the life of others; though we who look on think lightly of such premature despair, as if our vision of the future lightened the blind sufferer's present. — George Eliot

When your time is up, what are your last thoughts going to be?' I asked. 'All of your miserable memories? When you were lonely or scared or heartbroken? The things that almost kill you don't make you stronger. If anything, they make you bitter and closed off and broken.
( ... )
I think what you have to live for makes you stronger — Katie Kacvinsky

There is, perhaps, one universal truth about all forms of human cognition: the ability to deal with knowledge is hugely exceeded by the potential knowledge contained in man's environment. To cope with this diversity, man's perception, his memory, and his thought processes early become governed by strategies for protecting his limited capacities from the confusion of overloading. We tend to perceive things schematically, for example, rather than in detail, or we represent a class of diverse things by some sort of averaged typical instance. — Jerome Bruner

Whereas in a memory you edit things out and sort of restructure the things to seem a little bit more heroic, or to focus on particular aspects that magnify or reduce certain things. — Chris Ware

There are some things that don't change much. I find the smell of a dish, or the way a certain spice is crushed, or just a quick look at the way something has been put on a plate, can pull me back to another place and time. I love those memories that seem so far away, yet you can hold them and carry them with you, even forget them, and then, with a single taste or hint or a smell, be chaperoned back to a beautiful moment. — Tessa Kiros

War had rearranged my priorities. I now clung to memories more than goals or material things. But there were a few irreplaceable items that buoyed my spirit and fight for life. It was at that moment that I realized. Something was missing from my suitcase. — Ruta Sepetys

Life is painful and messed up. It gets complicated at the worst of times, and sometimes you have no idea where to go or what to do. Lots of times people just let themselves get lost, dropping into a wide open, huge abyss. But that's why we have to keep trying. We have to push through all that hurts us, work past all our memories that are haunting us. Sometimes the things that hurt us are the things that make us strongest. A life without experience, in my opinion, is no life at all. And that's why I tell everyone that, even when it hurts, never stop yourself from living. — Alysha Speer

I feel uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don't want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that's fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I'm wrong about that. — Chris Hayes

The important thing is to be honest with yourself. And to have the will and determination. My emotions are not me, but mine. My memories are not me, they're mine. I am the master of my emotions and my memories. So now, all you have to do is make up your mind firmly to leave those things behind without attachment or regret, and go through with it. — Ilchi Lee

Ester asked why people are sad.
"That's simple," says the old man. "They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams. — Paulo Coelho

Even if we are occupied with important things and even if we attain honour or fall into misfortune, still let us remember how good it once was here, when we were all together united by a good and kind feeling which made us perhaps better than we are. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Here lies Morris, a good man and friend. He enjoyed the finer points of civilized life but never shied away from a hearty adventure or hard work. He died a free man, which is more than most people can say, if we are going to be honest about it. Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven't the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood - weak blood, diluted - and their memories aren't worth a goddamned thing, you will see what I mean. — Patrick DeWitt

To me the ego is the habitual and compulsive thought processes that go through everybody's mind continuously. External things like possessions or memories or failures or successes or achievements. Your personal history. — Eckhart Tolle

The memories are so close I feel your presence everywhere. And I see forward so clearly and sadly to a time when the memories will be distant. I won't be able to picture your painting things scattered on a flat rock in Ammoudi or your bare feet soaking up the sunshine on Valia's garden wall. Now I see them. Long after that I will remember them. — Ann Brashares

A master of happiness will appreciate what he or she has while they have them and the moment any specific thing is gone or lost, the focus will be on other things to appreciate and be grateful for. At times, this could be gratitude for the memories that remain. Material and physical objects are temporary, memories are forever. — Zelig Pliskin

The memories we take to the ends of our lives have no real rhyme or reason, especially when you think of the endless things that you do over the course of a day, a week , a month, a year, a lifetime. All the cups of coffee, hand-washings, changes of clothes, lunches, goings to the bathroom, headaches, naps, walks to school, trips to the grocery store, conversations about the weather ---all the things so unimportant that they should be immediately forgotten. Yet they aren't — Michael Zadoorian

That night I looked up at those same stars, but I didn't want any of those things. I didn't want Egypt, or France, or far-flung destinations. I just wanted to go back to my life from my childhood, just to visit it, and touch it, and to convince myself that yes, it had been real. — Jenny Lawson

Maybe life isn't for everyone,
Sometimes you do things to start anew life.
But the new paths will always bring you back to the old ones or just show a glimpse of it so that you again go through those thousand memories.
and no matter how much you try to get rid of the old shoe, Life will bring you to a certain point
where you would want to throw off the new shoe and wear the old one back again..
and Maybe, maybe you would or maybe you would not.
For who knows, We re mysterious beings in these mysterious world trying to figure out our existence. — Alamvusha

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

There are some things we really need to take care of: the children, and grandparents. Children, whether they are young or older, they are the strength that moves us forward. We place our hope in them.Grandparents are the living memory of the family. They passed on the faith, they transmitted the faith, to us. — Pope Francis

Yet are you so certain, good mistress, you wish to be free of this mist? Is it not better some things remain hidden from our minds?"
"It may be for some, father, but not for us. Axl and I wish to have again the happy moments we shared together. To be robbed of them is as if a thief came in the night and took what's most precious from us."
"Yet the mist covers all memories, the bad as well as the good. Isn't that so, mistress?"
"We'll have the bad ones come back too, even if they make us weep or shake with anger. For isn't it the life we've shared? — Kazuo Ishiguro

It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that
well, for one, I don't even remember the event. It's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been
or, more precisely, being about to be
hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say that these are genuine memories? Who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap
the crater
that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers. — Tom McCarthy

Memories don't fade, it is just we who start overlooking the things once done or said. — Anuj

Our memories and the events of our lives are untidy things. We wish that we could file them away and shut the door, or we wish the opposite - that they would stay with us forever. You want to banish the remembrance of a tight hold on your ankle, a rope under a bed, the amber-colored medicine bottles of your father, the door your mother slams after a night of too much wine and jealousy. You want to keep close to you always that first sweet kiss, a maple leaf, that growing sense of yourself; you want to hold the sight of your dying father on that last boat trip, the calm you remember as your mother held you. Her voice. — Deb Caletti

And the more I thought about it, the more I dug out of my memory things I had overlooked or forgotten. I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage. — Albert Camus

Maybe the reason my memory is so bad is that I always do at least two things at once. It's easier to forget something you only half-did or quarter did. — Andy Warhol

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

Of all created things the source is one, Simple, single as love; remember The cell and seed of life, the sphere That is, of child, white bird, and small blue dragon-fly Green fern, and the gold four-petalled tormentilla The ultimate memory. Each latent cell puts out a future, Unfolds its differing complexity As a tree puts forth leaves, and spins a fate Fern-traced, bird feathered, or fish-scaled. — Kathleen Raine

Each year comes with its own memories! Memories that make us ponder! Memories that shake our nerves and thought to think about things we did, things we could have done, things we should have done, the right time and timing for the yes and no we could have say with courage or humility, the right time and timing of our steps and things we should have never done! When you remember the year, you remember something! Something good or something bad! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I asked my dad what people would remember sooner, the things I said or the things I did. His response was: Forgive me, but what people? — Stacey T. Hunt

Memories of that which we have lost are curious things - weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had and I have no longer — Alexander McCall Smith

The future rushes in and all we can do is take our memories and move forward with them. Memory keeps only what it wants. Images from memories are sprinkled throughout our lives, but that does not mean we must believe that our own or other people's memories are of things that really happened. When someone stubbornly insists that they saw something with their own eyes, I take it as a statement mixed with wishful thinking. As what they want to believe. Yet as imperfect as memories are, whenever I am faced with one, I cannot help getting lost in thought. Especially when that memory reminds me of what it felt like to be always out of place and always a step behind. Why was it so hard for me to open my eyes every morning, why was I so afraid to form a relationship with anyone, and why was I nevertheless able to break down my walls and find him? — Kyung-Sook Shin

Running a multi-million dollar business can be frustrating at times, especially when someone does something I am not happy with. It might not even be their fault, but it is human nature to reach in an angry or heated way. However, I have learned an important and effective lesson. Rather than complain to my member of staff about their actions, I search my memory bank for things I find wonderful about them. This changes the energy around the issue instantly. People tend to live up to what you expect of them. — Vishen Lakhiani

I was increasingly both horrified and sceptical about these memories - I had no recall of these things at all, though I couldn't imagine why I'd want to make it all up either. It felt as though it had all happened to somebody else, I was not there - it wasn't me - when those people did nasty things.
But then, of course, it didn't feel like me, that's the whole point of dissociation - to create distance between the victim and her experience of the abuse. The alters were created for just that purpose: so that I'd not be aware that it happened to me, but rather to "others". The trouble is, in reality it was my body that took the abuse. It was only my mind that was divided, and sooner or later the amnesic barriers were bound to come down.
And that's exactly what had begun to happen as I heard their stories. They triggered a vague and growing sense in me that this really is my story. — Carolyn Bramhall

It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he's lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten? — Margaret Atwood

The event itself played over in her mind, and the role she'd taken in the police investigation, the things she'd told them - worse, the thing she hadn't - made the panic so bad sometimes that she could hardly breathe. No matter where she went at Greenacres - inside the house or out in the garden - she felt trapped by what she'd seen and done. The memories where everywhere, they were inescapable; made worse because the event that caused them was utterly inexplicable. — Kate Morton

When the things you love exist only inside your memory they cannot be destroyed or taken from you. — Marina Tavares Dias

The imagined memories had to have as much weight as the real, or we had to at least pretend they did to such a degree that they just very well might have. And so I never questioned Angela about that particular story, or about all the troubling things that it pointed to, content to believe that at least in this version things worked for her better than they did in the one I never heard. — Dinaw Mengestu

We were once enwombed in the earth and the silence of the body remembers that dark, inner longing. Fashioned from clay, we carry the memory of the earth. Ancient, forgotten things stir within our hearts, memories from the time before the mind was born. Within us are depths that keep watch. These are depths that no words can trawl or light unriddle. — John O'Donohue

Frypan has no reason to process or think too deeply about the returning memories. They're not like new revelations, things to which he should respond somehow. They've always been there, inside him. He has already reactedto them. He has been shaped by them. He's not learning. He's not experiencing. He's remembering. — James Dashner

Children are often envied for their supposed imaginations, but the truth is that adults imagine things far more than children do. Most adults wander the world deliberately blind, living only inside their heads, in their fantasies, in their memories and worries, oblivious to the present, only aware of the past or future. — Dara Horn

And yet, though desirous to be gone, she could not quit the mansion-house, or look an adieu to the cottage, with its black, dripping and comfortless veranda, or even notice through the misty glasses the last humble tenements of the village, without a saddened heart. Scenes had passed in Uppercross which made it precious. It stood the record of many sensations of pain, once severe, but now softened; and of some instances of relenting feeling, some breathings of friendship and reconciliation, which could never be looked for again, and which could never cease to be dear. She left it all behind her, all but the recollection that such things had been. — Jane Austen

The one thing about kids is that you never really know exactly what they're thinking or how they're seeing. After writing about kids, which is a little bit like putting the experience under a magnifying glass, you realize you have no idea how you thought as a kid. I've come to the conclusion that most of the things that we remember about our childhood are lies. We all have memories that stand out from when we were kids, but they're really just snapshots. You can't remember how you reacted because your whole head is different when you stand aside. — Stephen King

If you get stuck in the memories of those times, you won't be able to appreciate all the fun that's happening right now. So don't think 'That time was fun', instead you should be thinking 'That time was also fun'. The really fun things can't be compared with one another. Ah, but here's a piece of advice: being able to find the fun that's happening right now, that is the best way to enjoy the present. Because of that you should be try your best to value the present, since it's going to change, sooner or later. — Kozue Amano

Things in the margins, including humans who wander there, are often on the brink of becoming someone else, or something else, whose memory may not include the significance of old markers. — Barbara Hurd

We all have a family and I think we all have a perception of our family that we like to keep and we all have our positive memories in a certain way. Then when life catches up to them, when you see a different perspective of them, or when you are a couple degrees over, you can see things differently and it shakes you to the foundation. — David Shapiro

It's enough to illuminate where I'm going, but not by much, so I pull out my phone and open the flashlight app. I pause and stare down at the open app on my phone. How did I know that was there? I wish there were rhyme or reason to why we remember some things and not others. I try to find a common link in the memories but come up completely empty. — Colleen Hoover

How wonderful it must be, to be unable to remember things that once caused us distress. Yet we should embrace all our memories, whether joyful or painful. They're all we ever really own in this life. — Isabel Wolff

Very little, really, in life is lost; material things, now and then; money which is material but necessary, often; friends, relatives, sometimes through estrangements. True love never, I believe. Death does not rob us of the essential person we have loved and still love. It deprives us of the physical presence, but never of the spiritual closeness, or of memories. — Faith Baldwin