Memories Quotes - Page 21

• Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Desire, Impulse, Wells

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2011). “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide”, p.142, Vintage

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• maybe memories are like karaoke-where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't know even half the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liiked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning- and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better to not know the lyrics to your life.

  Douglas Coupland

  Song, Ignorance, Thinking

  Douglas Coupland (2011). “The Gum Thief: A Novel”, p.85, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~Candle

  Gregory Maguire

  Heart, Body, Who We Are

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• believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade.

  Douglas Coupland

  Believe, Princess, Impact

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• Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

  Ann-Marie MacDonald

  Play, Stories, Knees

  Ann-Marie MacDonald (2011). “Fall On Your Knees”, p.255, Simon and Schuster

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• I sell ideas. Actually, if you think about it, everything is really no more than idea. The past is nothing more than a memory, which is one kind of idea. The future is still a hope, another kind of idea. The present is fleeting and becomes a memory before you can put your hands on it. All ideas. I sell ideas.

  Ted Dekker

  Past, Thinking, Hands

  Ted Dekker (2006). “Obsessed”, p.146, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• The scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories – not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Sorry, Couple, Ocean

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• We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

  Tom Stoppard

  Inspirational, Eye, Bridges

  Tom Stoppard (2007). “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, p.61, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• And I began to feel sorry for myself; for so many years, my drawer full of memories had held the same old stories.

  Paulo Coelho

  Sorry, Years, Stories

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• I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I-he-none of us-would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she'd built a world out of them she knew how to survive on even if no one else could.

  Nicole Krauss

  Dad, Winning, World

  Nicole Krauss (2006). “The History of Love: A Novel”, p.181, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

  Julian Barnes

  Lying, Imagination, Lessons

  Julian Barnes (1984). “Flaubert's parrot”, Vintage

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• Once, I was a master at recycling leftovers. Now I cultivate the art of simmering memories.

  Jean-Dominique Bauby

  Art, Leftovers, Recycling

  Jean-Dominique Bauby (2008). “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, p.36, Knopf Group E-Books

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• See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it

  Jodi Picoult

  World, Want, Bitter

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “My Sister's Keeper - Movie Tie-In: A Novel”, p.422, Simon and Schuster

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• Each night I lie down in a graveyard of memories. Moonlight spins a shroud about me.

  Jerry Spinelli

  Lying, Night, Moonlight

  Jerry Spinelli (2012). “The Stargirl Collection”, p.138, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• Strong winds buffet the sea oats and tall dune grasses, tossing sand and seabirds where it will, winding my sister's golden hair into sunlit spirals of silk until it becomes the only good memory I have of her -- the only memory I allowed myself to keep.

  Karen White

  Strong, Hair, Oats

  Karen White (2008). “The Memory of Water”, p.11, Penguin

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• When I awoke it was daylight. The inside of my tent was coated in a curious flaky rime, which I realized after a moment was all of my nighttime snores, condensed and frozen and pasted to the fabric, as if into a scrapbook of respiratory memories.

  Bill Bryson

  Fabric, Frozen, Daylight

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• Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Perception, Together, Maps

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• But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself. I cannot remember. She's been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason... Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning.

  Jane Yolen

  Past, Hair, Mourning

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• In that book which is my memory, On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you, Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life’.

  Dante Alighieri

  Book, New Life, Pages

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• After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don't have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!

  Steve Toltz

  Past, Thinking, Looks

  Steve Toltz (2008). “A fraction of the whole”

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• Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories.

  Oscar Wilde

  Music, Art, Tears

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “Epigrams of Oscar Wilde”, p.88, Wordsworth Editions

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• If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t hassle a browser – and steal the contents of books by reading them. I drank down 1984 while loitering in the 'O' section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping vessel of my attention carefully out of the shop.

  Francis Spufford

  Book, Reading, Giants

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• Like tired dogs they stand there, because they use up all their strength in remaining upright in one's memory.

  Franz Kafka

  Dog, Tired, Use

  Franz Kafka (1965). “The Diaries of Franz Kafka”

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• The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.

  William Butler Yeats

  Confused, Men, Trying

  William Butler Yeats (2015). “When You Are Old: Early Poems, Plays, and Fairy Tales”, p.222, Penguin

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• It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Heart, Names, Voice

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “The Crossing”, p.296, Pan Macmillan

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