Famous Quotes & Sayings

Samuel Beckett

The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.

Samuel Beckett

It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter.

Samuel Beckett

Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.

Salman Rushdie

...in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I'm afraid, with the shadows of imperfections.

Salman Rushdie

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

Salman Rushdie

Our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets...My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility , the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind.

Salman Rushdie

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

Rudolf Steiner

We create the possibility for a better human form in our next life if during our jamaloca existence after death, when we still have an astral body, we can have memories connected with music.

W. P. Kinsella

1946, if my memory is correct. Harry "The Cat" Brecheen went against the Red Sox in Game 7. I stayed home to listen, practically had my head inside the radio.

W. G. Sebald

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.

W. G. Sebald

At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory.

W. G. Sebald

In my photographic work I was always especially entranced... by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them.

W. G. Sebald

...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

W. G. Sebald

One has the impression that something is stirring inside [photographs] - it is as if one can hear little cries of despair, gémissements de désespoir... as if the photographs themselves had a memory and were remembering us and how we, the surviving, and those who preceded us, once were.

W. S. Merwin

part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

W. S. Gilbert

I shall carry to the Catacombs of Age, Photographically lined On the tablet of my mind

W. H. Auden

Christ did not enchant men; He demanded that they believe in Him: except on one occasion, the Transfiguration. For a brief while, Peter, James, and John were permitted to see Him in His glory. For that brief while they had no need of faith. The vision vanished, and the memory of it did not prevent them from all forsaking Him when He was arrested, or Peter from denying that he had ever known Him.

W. H. Auden

Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place;

Wayne Gretzky

When people come up to me and say, "I was at your Game 7 in the playoffs in Toronto," or, "I saw your first goal in the NHL," that triggers memories. But I don't sit around my kitchen table and tell my kids, "You know, one year I got 92 goals."

Tove Jansson

Smell is important. It reminds a person of all the things he's been through; it is a sheath of memories and security.

Vasily Grossman

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.

Van Morrison

Memories, how they linger in the twilight and in the wee small hours sometimes just before dawn.

Twyla Tharp

Every dance I make is a dive into this well of ancient memory.

Twyla Tharp

There are as many forms of memory as there are ways of perceiving, and every one of them is worth mining for inspiration.

William Godwin

Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.

William Golding

His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.

William Goldman

People don't remember me. Really. It's not a paranoid thing; I just have this habit of slipping through memories. It doesn't bother me all that much, except I guess that's a lie; it does. For some reason, I test very high on forgettability.

Warren Zevon

My memory is not even what most peoples is, much less what it oughta be for a discussion like this.

Waylon Jennings

Those neon light nights, couldn't stay out of fights, keeps a-haunting me in memories. There is one in every crowd, for crying out loud, why was is always turning out to be me?

Stephen Chbosky

Maybe it’s sad that these are now memories. And maybe it’s not sad.

Stephen Chbosky

As I was walking up the stairs to dad's old room, and I was looking at the photographs, I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories. That someone actually took the photograph, and the people in the photograph had just eaten lunch or something.

Stephen Chbosky

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.

Stephen Chbosky

there was a time when these weren't memories.