Memories Quotes

“Unhappy memories are persistent. They're specific, and it's the details that refuse to leave us alone. Though a happy memory may stay with you just as long as one that makes you miserable, what you remember softens over time. What you recall is simply that you were happy, not necessarily the individual moments that brought about your joy.

But the memory of something painful does just the opposite. It retains its original shape, all bony fingers and pointy elbows. Every time it returns, you get a quick poke in the eye or jab in the stomach. The memory of being unhappy has the power to hurt us long after the fact. We feel the injury anew each and every time we think of it.”
― Cameron Dokey, Belle

“Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Will. For a moment her heart hesitated. She remembered when Will had died, her agony, the long nights alone, reaching across the bed every morning when she woke up, for years expecting to find him there, and only slowly growing accustomed to the fact that side of the bed would always be empty. The moments when she had found something funny and turned to share the joke with him, only to be shocked anew that he was not there. The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that, like the sound of Jem's violin music, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“And the moral of the story is that you don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.”
― John Green

“If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.”
― Héloïse d'Argenteuil, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse

“In a person's lifetime there may be not more than half a dozen occasions that he can look back to in the certain knowledge that right then, at that moment, there was room for nothing but happiness in his heart.”
― Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, Belles on Their Toes

“The way our fingers intertwine feels so natural and right; as if our hands hold memories of meeting in a thousand other lifetimes.”
― John Mark Green

“It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.”
― Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

“Too many years fighting back tears. Why can't the past just die? Wishing you were somehow here again, knowing we must say goodbye. Try to forgive, teach me to live, give me the strength to try! No more memories, no more silent tears, no more gazing across the wasted years. Help me say goodbye.”
― Charles Hart, The Phantom of the Opera: Piano/Vocal

“These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Commander Tool Belt" Jason said.
"Bad Boy Supreme" Piper said.
"Chef Leo the Tofu Taco Expert."
They laughed and told stories about Leo valdez, their best friend. They stayed on the roof until dawn rose, and Piper started to believe they could have a fresh start. It might even be possible to tell a new story in which Leo was still out there.
Somewhere...”
― Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus

“some winters
will never melt

some summers
will never freeze

and some things will only
... live in poems.”
― Sanober Khan, Turquoise Silence

“Our spirit is mightier than the filth of our memories.”
― Melina Marchetta, Quintana of Charyn

“He looked at me like I was the stars when all I’d ever felt like was the dark nothingness between them.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“Memories keep us stay alive as they gently cuddle us along the squirming roads of our lives and even warn us sometimes of insidious pitfalls. ("Knowing someone was waiting")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“In truth a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit.”
― Marge Kennedy

“You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.”
― Stephen King, It

“You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York

“People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the big old cedars at the entrance to the maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived - maybe a million times more. Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of televisions programs, of e-mails, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I am going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscape we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.

We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Mom's everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didn't think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“Images flicker, each one bringing its own sorrow or its own smile. Sometimes both. At the very worst, an impenetrable and sightless black and at best, a happiness so bright that it hurts the eyes to see, coming and going on some unseen projector perpetually turned by an invisible hand. One, then another. The hollow click of the shutter. Now stop. Freeze this frame. Pluck it down and hold it close and be damned by what you see. Henri always said: the price of a memory is the memory if the sorrow it brings.”
― Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four

“My heart's with you, Bill, no matter how it turns out. My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams.”
― Stephen King, It

“If we knew a person was going to die, we'd hold harder to the memories."

Fire corrected him, in a whisper. "The good memories.”
― Kristin Cashore, Fire

“I think the only answer is to live life to the fullest while you can and collect memories like fools collect money. Because in the end, that's all you have - happy memories.”
― Sarah Strohmeyer, Kindred Spirits

“There are memories I am better off without. Things better lost forever.”
― S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep

“I want to believe that memories, even sad and painful ones, should not be forgotten forever.”
― Momiji Sohma

“I want to take all our best moments, put them in a jar, and take them out like cookies and savor each one of them forever.”
― Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading

“That's the beautiful thing about innocence; even monsters have a pocketful of childhood memories with which to seek comfort with.”
― Dave Matthes, Sleepeth Not, the Bastard

“There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown