Quotes about memory

The day is at hand which I shall keep (such, O gods, was your will) ever as a day of grief, ever as of honour.

though my mind shudders to remember, and has recoiled in grief, I will begin.

Heartbreaking things I saw with my own eyes

And was myself a part of.

I shall never deny what you deserve, my queen,

never regret my memories of Dido, not while I

can recall myself and draw the breath of life.

Sorrow too deep to tell, your majesty,

You order me to feel and tell once more.

Some day, perhaps, remembering even this

Will be a pleasure.

No doubt you are right, my best of friends, there would be far less suffering amongst mankind, if men—and God knows why they are so fashioned—did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity.

Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.

Time robs us of all, even of memory.

The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish.

In that book which is

My memory...

On the first page

That is the chapter when

I first met you

Appear the words...

Here begins a new life.

For an aggregate of sensations to have become a remembrance capable of classification in time, it must have ceased to be actual, we must have lost the sense of its infinite complexity, otherwise it would have remained present. It must, so to speak, have crystallized around a center of associations of ideas which will be a sort of label. It is only when they have lost all life that we can classify our memories in time as a botanist arranges dried flowers in his herbarium.