Famous Quotes & Sayings

Willard Gaylin

We occupy a space of our own creation-a collage compounded by bits and pieces of actuality arranged into a design determined by our internal perceptions, our hopes, our fears, our memories, and our anticipations.

William T. Vollmann

Whereas if I want to create a prostitute character now from memories of different prostitutes and inventing stuff, I can say, "this could happen," "this is quite plausible." But I don't feel I know enough about border life to do the latter.

William T. Vollmann

Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.

William Stafford

Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.

William Least Heat-Moon

Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.

William Butler Yeats

A spot whereon the founders lived and died Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees, Or gardens rich in memory glorified Marriages, alliances, and families, And every bride's ambition satisfied.

William Butler Yeats

I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

William Butler Yeats

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

All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. It is only in those who have built up a rich world of memories and habits of thought that extreme opinions affront the sense of probability. Propositions, for instance, which set all the truth upon one side can only enter rich minds to dislocate and strain, if they can enter at all, and sooner or later the mind expels them by instinct.

William Butler Yeats

What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?

Wilhelm Reich

Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you're still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love.

Walter Savage Landor

Ah what avails the sceptred race, Ah what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes May weep, but never see, A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee.

Walter Hagen

No one remembers who came in second.

William Morris

A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works.

William Morris

Speak not, move not, but listen, the sky is full of gold. No ripple on the river, no stir in field or fold, All gleams but naught doth glisten, but the far-off unseen sea. Forget days past, heart broken, put all memory by! No grief on the green hillside, no pity in the sky, Joy that may not be spoken fills mead and flower and tree.

William Kennedy

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.

Yo-Yo Ma

Practicing is not only playing your instrument, either by yourself or rehearsing with others - it also includes imagining yourself practicing. Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining the task or actually doing it.

Winston Churchill

Quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts.

Winston Churchill

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

Winston Churchill

The only guide to a man's conscience, the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions.

Willie Morris

I have always had a love for American geography, and especially for the landscapes of the South. One of my pleasures has been to drive across it, with no one in the world knowing where I am, languidly absorbing the thoughts and memories of old moments, of people vanished now from my life.

William Zinsser

Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.

William Zinsser

Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.

William S. Burroughs

Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.

William Maxwell

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

What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

Violette Leduc

To have an inner life, to think, to juggle and leap, to become a tightrope walker in the world of ideas. To attack, to riposte, to refute, what a contest, what acclaim. To understand. The most generous word of all. Memory. To retain, a geyser of felicity. Intelligence. The agonizing poverty of my mind. Words and ideas flitting in and out like butterflies. My brain a dandelion seed blown in the wind.

Viola Spolin

Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people's findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with reality, and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole. It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression.

Woodrow Wilson

It must be a peace without victory...Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.

Wislawa Szymborska

Memory at last has what I sought.

Wislawa Szymborska

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.

Wim Wenders

Photographs put time into such a perspective. They humble us and our selfish memories.

William Trevor

Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.