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Gizmotude Quotation Archives

 

Memories

Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things. ~~ Pierce Harris

 

Gaiety is forgetfulness of the self, melancholy is memory of the self: in that state the soul feels all the power of its roots, nothing distracts it from its profound homeland and the look that it casts upon the outer world is gently dismayed. ~~ Adrienne Monnier

 

The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust. ~~ Elizabeth Bowen

 

However often marriage is dissolved, it remains indissoluble. Real divorce, the divorce of heart and nerve and fiber, does not exist, since there is no divorce from memory. ~~ Virgilia Peterson [A Matter of Life and Death]

 

Envy's memory is nothing but a row of hooks to hang up grudges on. ~~ John Watson Foster

 

Some of the days in November carry the whole memory of summer as a fire opal carries the color of moonrise. ~~ Gladys Taber

 

When the print press examines a politician's performance, very few voters are interested in detail. The essence of the modern campaign is personality politics: the direct impressions that viewers form from thirty-second daily blips on the Boss Tube, preaching homilies and honing bumper-sticker themes to stick in voters' memories. ~~ Hedrick Smith

 

What beastly incidents our memories insist on cherishing!… the ugly and disgusting… the beautiful things we have to keep diaries to remember! ~~ Eugene O'Neill [Strange Interlude]

 

It's not the fact that all my hair is jumping ship in droves,
or that I hoard by medicines like precious treasure troves.
It's not that once-true memory banks will not cooperate,
or parts that once had muscle tone now downward gravitate.
It's not the fact that I can't eat the foods I used to love.
It's not a single one of these-- it's all of the above. ~~ Robert Scotellaro

 

Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else. ~~ Alan Bennett

 

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory. ~~ Joseph Conrad

 

Pray for a short memory as to all unkindnesses. ~~ Charles E. Spurgeon

 

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. ~~ Barbara Kingsolver

 

Happiness? That's nothing more than health and a poor memory. ~~ Albert Schweitzer

 

Nostalgia: A device that removes the ruts and potholes from memory lane. ~~ Doug Larson

 

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we bury in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames. ~~ E. M. Cioran

 

A people's memory is history; and a man without a memory, like a people without a history, cannot grow wiser, better. ~~ Isaac Leibush Peretz

 

She has lost her memory. Each sentence she speaks is in the present tense. She is letting the past slip from her hand, a fish into dark water. ~~ Mary Gordon

 

The memory of past favors is like a rainbow, bright, vivid and beautiful. But it soon fades away. The memory of injuries is engraved on the heart, and remains forever. ~~ Thomas C. Haliburton

 

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, previous. At least the past is safe--though we don't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived. ~~ Susan Sontag

 

All stimulation generates a memory--and these memories have to go somewhere. Our bodies are essentially diskettes. ~~ Douglas Coupland

 

Memory is the thing you forget with. ~~ Alexander Chase

 

Who knows what true loneliness is--not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. ~~ Joseph Conrad

 

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present. ~~ George Santayana

 

To understand a man, you must know his memories. The same is true of a nation. ~~ Anthony Quayle

 

Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking. ~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

 

Victory has a hundred memories but defeat has amnesia. ~~ W. I. E. Gates

 

My father was a romancer and most of my memories of him are colored I fear by an untruthfulness that I must have caught from him like one of the colds that ran around my family. ~~ Mary McCarthy

 

If you look at all these band names, they're just really stupid names; and the more stupid the name, the more outstanding it is, I guess. Or the more memorable. ~~ Keith Morris

 

I have a remarkable memory; I forget everything. It is wonderfully convenient. It is as though the world were constantly renewing itself for me. ~~ Jules Renard

 

10 reasons why everyone should have a sister:
1) The common thread of family memories.
2) A friendly voice as close as the nearest phone.
3) The person who understands you the best.
4) Someone to share your joys and sorrows.
5) The one woman you can always count on.
6) The fun times of family get-togethers.
7) The one who loves you despite your faults.
8) Your best friend and confidante.
9) The comfort of never feeling alone.
10) The joy of growing older together. ~~ Janet Lanese

 

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events. ~~ Adrienne Rich

 

Icelandic peoples were the ones who memorized sagas… We were the first rappers of Europe. ~~ Bjork

 

Memory seldom fails when its office is to show us the tombs of our buried hopes. ~~ Lady Marguerite Blessington

Youth is vivid rather than happy, but memory always remembers the happy things. ~~ Bernard Lovell

 

Memories are everyone's second chance at happiness. ~~ Queen Elizabeth

 

Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory. ~~ Leonardo da Vinci

 

A liar should have a good memory. ~~ Quintilian

 

They are not really fixing the streets. They are just moving the holes around so the motorists cannot memorize them. ~~ Herb Shriner

 

My memory is so bad that many times I forget my own name! ~~ Miguel de Cervantes

 

… the qualities I cherish in the people I love--their wit, humor, courage, loyalty, faith, compassion, mercy--are not ultimately the work of the flesh. These things outlast the body; they live on in the memories of family and friends, live on forever by inspiring others to be kind and loving. Humor, faith, courage, compassion--these don't rot and vanish; they are impervious to bacteria, stronger than time or gravity; they have their genesis in something less fragile than blood and bone, in a soul that endures. ~~ Dean Koontz [Seize the Night]

 

Sometimes what we call "memory" and what we call "imagination" are not so easily distinguished. ~~ Leslie Marmon Silko [Storyteller]

 

Memory is the thing you forget with. ~~ Alexander Chase

 

Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory; odors when sweet violets sicken, live within the sense they quicken. ~~ Percy Shelley

 

I shall go the way of the open sea,
To the lands I knew before you came,
And the cool clean breezes shall blow from me
The memory of your name. ~~ Laurence Hope

 

I can understand that memory must be selective, else it would choke on the glut of experience. What I cannot understand is why it selects what it does. ~~ Virgilia Peterson

 

There are unsolicited purrs. A cat has to be in a very bad mood if a human cannot coax him to purr. There is little honor in this achievement, only the satisfaction that a minute or two is being soothed by such a pleasant sound. But the unsolicited purrs belong to quite another category. These are the jewels of the cat fraternity, distributed sparingly, like high honors in a kingdom. They are brought about by the great general contentment. No special incident induces them. No memory of past or prospect of future banquets. Just a whole series of happy thoughts suddenly combine together and whoever is near enough is lucky enough to hear the result. ~~ Derek Tangye

 

God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December. ~~ J. M. Barrie

 

Man is the only creature whose emotions are entangled with his memory. ~~ Marjorie Holmes

 

Growing up is usually so painful that people make comedies out of it to soften the memory. ~~ John Greenwald

 

The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying. ~~ Marcel Proust

 

One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with. ~~ Phyllis Rose

 

In memory everything seems to happen to music. ~~ Tennessee Williams

 

There is something terrible yet soothing about returning to a place where you once lived. You are one of your own memories. ~~ Mary Morris

 

The palest ink is better than the best memory. ~~ Chinese proverb

 

Those who have been required to memorize the world as it is will never create the world as it might be. ~~ Judith Groch

 

Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit. ~~ Harriet Doerr

 

But living in peace and plenty, she could honor her father's memory only through the small heroics of daily life: by doing her job well and paying her way in the world, by commitment to her marriage in good times and bad, by giving all possible support to her friends, by having true compassion for life's walking wounded… while living with honesty and truthfulness and enough self-respect to avoid becoming one of them. These small heroics, never acknowledged with awards and stirring marches, are the fuel and the lubrication that keep the machine of civilization humming, and in a world rife with temptations to be self-indulgent, self-centered, and self-satisfied, there are surprisingly more small heroes than might be expected. ~~ Dean Koontz [False Memory]

 

Years flowed in and flowed out of his mind like tides, leaving pools of memories full of small living things. ~~ Margaret Millar [As for Me Tomorrow]

 

I think that at U2 concerts it seems to me that the audience almost applaud themselves … When they hear songs from a few years ago, their own memories are woven into them. ~~ Bono

 

When a man or woman loves to brood over a sorrow and takes care to keep it green in their memory, you may be sure it is no longer a pain to them. ~~ Jerome K. Jerome

 

It is the mark of a superior man that, left to himself, he is able endlessly to amuse, interest, and entertain himself out of his personal stock of meditations, ideas, criticisms, memories, philosophy, humor, and what not. ~~ George Jean Nathan

 

A man's fatherliness is enriched as much by his acceptance of his feminine and childlike strivings as it is by his memories of tender closeness with his own father. A man who has been able to accept tenderness from his father is able later in life to be tender with his own children. ~~ Louise J. Kaplan

 

An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory. ~~ Franklin P. Jones

 

Our memories are card indexes--consulted, and then put back in disorder, by authorities whom we do not control. ~~ Cyril Connolly

 

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again. ~~ Willa Cather

 

We must always have old memories and young hopes. ~~ Arsene Houssaye

 

Creditors have better memories than debtors. ~~ Benjamin Franklin

 

Into the father's grave the daughter, sometimes a gray-haired woman, lays away forever the little pet names and memories which to all the rest of the world are but foolishness. ~~ Constance Fenimore Woolson [Anne]

 

Magical country, full of memories and dreams,
My youth lies in the crevices of your hills;
Here in the silk of your grass by the edge of the meadows,
Every flower and leaf has its memories of you. ~~ Katherine Tynan Hinkson

 

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language. ~~ Joyce Carol Oates

 

April is the cruelest month,
breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,
mixing memory and desire,
stirring dull roots with Spring rain. ~~ T. S. Eliot

 

Memory feeds imagination. ~~ Amy Tan

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. ~~ Salvador Dali

 

Spring is the season of hope, and autumn is that of memory. ~~ Countess of Blessington

 

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past. ~~ Mary Webb

 

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews. ~~ John Updike

 

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. ~~ Saul Bellow

 

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. ~~ Alfred de Musset

 

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden. ~~ T. S. Eliot

 

Our memories are independent of our wills. It is not so easy to forget. ~~ Richard Sheridan

 

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that we use it so little. ~~ Rachel Carson

 

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory. ~~ Franklin Pierce Adams

 

The middle-aged, who have lived through their strongest emotions, but are yet in the time when memory is still half passionate and not merely contemplative, should surely be a sort of natural priesthood, whom life has disciplined and consecrated to be the refuge and rescue of early stumblers and victims of self-despair. ~~ George Eliot (see Said Who?)

 

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience … from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation. ~~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

 

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact. ~~ Diane Sawyer

 

Everyone complains of his memory, and nobody complains of his judgment. ~~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

 

I believe the true function of age is memory. I'm recording as fast as I can. ~~ Rita Mae Brown

 

Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children. ~~ Charles R. Swindoll

 

A picture memory brings to me;
I look across the years and see
Myself beside my mother's knee
I feel her gentle hand restrain
My selfish moods, and know again
A child's blind sense of wrong and pain.
But wiser now,
A man gray grown,
My childhood's needs are better known.
My mother's chastening love I own. ~~ John Greenleaf Whitter

 

Each time Honolulu city lights
Stir up memories in me
Each time Honolulu city lights
Will bring me back again. ~~ Keola Beamer [song, Honolulu City Lights]

 

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going. ~~ Tennessee Williams

 

Memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup. ~~ Elizabeth Bowen [The House in Paris]

 

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in … Fear and resentment of what is new is really a lament for the memories of our childhood. ~~ Peter Medawar

 

When I think of my father, the memories that bubble to the surface are not policy or politics. They are the man who opened a child's imagination, who taught her to be a good horsewoman and to always get back on when I fell off. ~~ Patti Davis

 

I've a grand memory for forgetting. ~~ Robert Louis Stevenson

 

You never know when you're making a memory. ~~ Rickie Lee Jones

 

It's surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time. ~~ Barbara Kingsolver

 

As siblings, we were inextricably bound, even though our connections were loose and frayed… And each time we met, we discovered to our surprise and dismay how quickly the intensity of childhood feelings reappeared… No matter how old we got or how often we tried to show another face, reality was filtered through yesterday's memories. ~~ Jane Mersky Leder

 

The memories of long love gather like drifting snow, poignant as the mandarin ducks who float side by side in sleep. ~~ Lady Murasaki

 

The heart of marriage is memories. ~~ Bill Cosby

 

I think, myself, that one's memories represent those moments which, insignificant as they may seem, nevertheless represent the inner self and oneself as most really oneself. ~~ Agatha Christie [An Autobiography]

 

The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good; and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burdens of the past. ~~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 

This week's biographical sketch: George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans [pen name George Eliot] was born in 1819 in Arbury, Warwickshire. Evans attended school in Coventry, where she was an exemplary student. She studied foreign languages, philosophy, theology and literature. Her first work, published in the Westminster Review, was a collection of comic stories in which she dismissed the popular religious literature of the time as fodder for the brainless. In 1854 she began a long and happy union with G. H. Lewes, a philosopher and writer. Evans regarded the relationship as a marriage, though it involved social ostracism and could have no legal sanction because Lewes' estranged wife was living and his religious beliefs prevented him from divorcing. Throughout his life, Lewes encouraged Evans in her literary career; indeed, it is possible that without him Evans, who was subject to periods of depression and in constant need of reassurance, would not have written a word. In 1856, Evans began Scenes of Clerical Life, a series of sketches that first appeared in Blackwood's Magazine under the pseudonym Lewes chose for her: George Eliot. Although not a popular success, Scenes was well received by literary critics, particularly Dickens and Thackeray. The worlds Eliot created in her novels of provincial life, Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1872) and Silas Marner (1861) were imperfect ones, where adultery was a common theme; and her female characters tended to be foolish, if admirable souls. Virginia Woolf called Eliot's novel Middlemarch (1872) "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." In her last novel, Daniel Deronda, Eliot imbued her women characters with more righteous aggression (the protagonist pushes her abusive husband off a sailboat). At the age of 60 (three years after the death of Lewes), Evans married her financial advisor, who was 20 years her junior. Evans died seven months later, in 1880. Writing about life in small rural towns, George Eliot was primarily concerned with the responsibility that people assume for their lives and with the moral choices they must inevitably make. Although highly serious, her novels are marked by compassion and a subtle humor. She is recognized by many as the greatest English novelist of her time.