Famous Quotes & Sayings

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?

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 Scott

Still are the thoughts to memory dear.

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.