Famous Quotes & Sayings

Isabel Allende

My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.

Isabel Allende

I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?

Isabel Allende

Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.

Isabel Allende

As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing?

Isabel Allende

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

Isabel Allende

My grandfather was dying, and told the family he had decided to die. ... At that moment I wanted so badly to write and tell him that he was never going to die, that somehow he would always be present in my life, because he had a theory that death didn't exist, only forgetfulness did. He believed that if you can keep people in your memory, they will live forever. That's what he did with my grandmother.

Isabel Allende

Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.

Isabel Allende

Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.

Isabel Allende

...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.

Irving Kristol

I regard myself to have been a young Trostkyite and I have not a single bitter memory.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Memory says, 'I did that.' Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I know my fate. One day my name will be tied to the memory of something monstrous - a crisis without equal on earth.... I am no man, I am dynamite!

Friedrich Nietzsche

The so called unconscious inferences can be traced back to the all-preserving memory, which presents us with parallel experiences and hence already knows the consequences of an action. It is not anticipation of the effects; rather, it is the feeling: identical causes, identical effects . . .

George Benson

The less one remembers about the day before, the more the new day will be unfettered by triviality.

George Bernard Shaw

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

Gena Showalter

If he had to have strange powers, Aden wished they could have been more like hers. That voodoo voice would have made his life a lot easier; he could have sent certain people (cough Ozzie cough) away with no memory of him.

Gena Showalter

You're going to have to settle on one eventually. Why not save us both the hassle, close your eyes and point. Whoever you're pointing at will be our winner." "I've played that game once before. Ended up--" Paris shuddered. "Never mind. It's not good to wander down that particular memory trail. So no. Just no.

Galway Kinnell

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Freeman Dyson

No matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.

Fred Frith

I write with a mouse, because it has no psychological associations or memories or habits associated with it.

Erich Maria Remarque

And even if these scenes from our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not.

Erich Maria Remarque

One often feels as though something had happened before, I remember. It comes quite close to you and stands there and you know it was just this way once before, exactly so; for an instant you almost know how it must go on, but then it disappears as you try to lay hold of it like smoke or a dead memory. "We could never remember, Isabelle," I say. "It's like the rain. That has also become one, out of two gasses, oxygen and hydrogen, which no longer remember they were once gasses. Now they are only rain and have no memory of an earlier time.

Erich Maria Remarque

Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory.

Erich Maria Remarque

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

Erica Jong

Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.

Erica Jong

I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps.We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves !

Eric Church

Funny how a melody sounds like a memory.

Eric Burdon

I did have a life before the Animals, and I'm trying constantly to prove that I have a life after the Animals. People tend to forget that I was the frontman with War for two years. People sort of have compartmental memories.

Eric Cantona

You can feel very quickly as a prisoner of your past, of the memories.

Eric Cantona

I'm proud of what I achieved there, but a life built on memories is not much of a life.

Eoin Colfer

Hey, if you can't remember, don't worry about it. I'm having a few memory problems myself in this place. Little things like how long I've been here, what my purpose in life is, which feet to put my shoes on. Stuff like that.

Eminem

My earliest memory was raping the babysitter when I was 5...she was 15.

Hannah Kent

Memories shift like loose snow in a wind, or are a chorale of ghosts all talking over one another. There is only ever a sense that what is real to me is not real to others, and to share a memory with someone is to risk sullying my belief in what has truly happened.