literary memory quotes: 1

"There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side."
George Eliot / Daniel Deronda

The memories which peaceful country scenes call up, are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands for the graves of those we loved: may purify our thoughts, and bear down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this, there lingers, in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed consciousness of having held such feelings long before, in some remote and distant time, which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath it.
Charles Dickens / Oliver Twist

Joy and grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears: for even grief itself arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all character of pain.
Charles Dickens / Oliver Twist

Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.
Gilbert Parker / Romany of the Snows

"There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance."
Gilbert Parker / Mrs. Falchion

"Lord keep my memory green!"
Charles Dickens / The Haunted Man

Recollections of the past and visions of the present come to bear me company; the meanest man to whom I have ever given alms appears, to add his mite of peace and comfort to my stock; and whenever the fire within me shall grow cold, to light my path upon this earth no more, I pray that it may be at such an hour as this, and when I love the world as well as I do now. Charles Dickens / Master Humphrey's Clock

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. / The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

Grace Stepney's mind was like a kind of moral fly-paper, to which the buzzing items of gossip were drawn by a fatal attraction, and where they hung fast in the toils of an inexorable memory.
Edith Wharton / The House of Mirth

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
George Eliot

At a single strain of music, the scent of a flower, or even one glimpse of a path of moonlight lying fair upon a Summer sea, the barriers crumble and fall. Through the long corridors the ghosts of the past walk unforbidden, hindered only by broken promises, dead hopes, and dream-dust.
Myrtle Reed / Old Rose and Silver

"Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us."
Oscar Wilde / The Importance of Being Earnest

And from that hour his poor maimed spirit, only remembering the place where it had broken its wings, cancelled the dream through which it had since groped, and knew of nothing beyond the Marshalsea.
Charles Dickens / Little Dorrit

Anne always remembered the silvery, peaceful beauty and fragrant calm of that night. It was the last night before sorrow touched her life; and no life is ever quite the same again when once that cold, sanctifying touch has been laid upon it.
Lucy Maud Montgomery / Anne of Green Gables

The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns!
Herman Melville / Moby Dick

"If you will take me for your wife, Walter, I will love you dearly. If you will let me go with you, Walter, I will go to the world's end without fear. I can give up nothing for you - I have nothing to resign, and no one to forsake; but all my love and life shall be devoted to you, and with my last breath I will breathe your name to God if I have sense and memory left."
Charles Dickens / Dombey and Son

My spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of nature; the past was blotted from my memory, the present was tranquil, and the future gilded by bright rays of hope and anticipations of joy. Mary Shelley Frankenstein

"I remember a mass of things, but nothing distinctly; a quarrel, but nothing wherefore. O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!"
William Shakespeare / Othello

"There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences."
Jane Austen / Mansfield Park

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
George Eliot / The Mill on the Floss

"Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory . . . "
Joseph Conrad / Lord Jim

Love, however, is very materially assisted by a warm and active imagination: which has a long memory, and will thrive, for a considerable time, on very slight and sparing food.
Charles Dickens / Nicholas Nickleby

"If our affections be tried, our affections are our consolation and comfort; and memory, however sad, is the best and purest link between this world and a better."
Charles Dickens / Nicholas Nickleby

"It's in vain, Trot, to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present."
Charles Dickens / David Copperfield

It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances, many errors, many unavailing sorrows and regrets.
Charles Dickens / David Copperfield

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.
Edward de Bono

Every man's memory is his private literature.
Aldous Huxley

We do not remember days; we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese / The Burning Brand

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Oscar Wilde / The Importance of Being Earnest

The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Emily Dickinson / Time and Eternity

A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.
Hortense Calisher / Queenie, 1971

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


Memory itself is an internal rumour.
George Santayana / The Life of Reason

It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?
Lord Byron

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. Cynthia Ozick

The past is never dead, it is not even past.
William Faulkner

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them. Friedrich Nietzsche

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

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.
John Updike



Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.
Diane Ackerman / A Natural History of the Senses


The sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that had left the conscious mind.
Thalassa Cruso / To Everything There is a Season, 1973

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
Samuel Johnson

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

The faintest waft is sometimes enough to induce feelings of hunger or anticipation, or to transport you back through time and space to a long-forgotten moment in your childhood. It can overwhelm you in an instant or simply tease you, creeping into your consciousness slowly and evaporating almost the moment it is detected.
Stephen Lacey / Scent in Your Garden, 1991

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.
Frank Deford

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
Friedrich Nietzsche

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

"From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers."
William Shakespeare / Henry V

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events.
Albert Einstein

The true art of memory is the art of attention.
Samuel Johnson

In literature and art memory is a synonyme for invention. It is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are empty.
Robert Aris Willmott


No canvas absorbs color like memory.
Robert Aris Willmott

Memory is the cabinet of imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience and the council-chamber of thought. Giambattista Basile