Recollection Quotes

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust

“You should always be taking pictures, if not with a camera then with your mind. Memories you capture on purpose are always more vivid than the ones you pick up by accident.”
― Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.”
― Harold Pinter, Old Times

“Recollection builds up our personality. Our individuality is based on all the little pieces we assembled in the past. ("The past was her best friend")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“As we walk through life, fleeting emotional episodes may keep on twinkling, curl up in the hive of our recollection and enrich our imagination. In the same vein, esthetic allurement and poetic gracefulness may possess us, besiege our mind, light up our thinking and shape our future. ( Über alle Gipfeln ist Ruh”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“If memorable settings do not ring any bells anymore in the twisting lobes of our memory or do not raise a single tingling in our emotions, let us, then, rethink things over to re-invent ourselves and find out what killed the vital air of our recollection. ("Just for a moment" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“That brief walk was one of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.
[p214]”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.”
― Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

“In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“Can we account for instinct?' said Monte Cristo. 'Are there not some places where we seem to breathe sadness? — why, we cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections — an idea which carries you back to other times, to other places — which, very likely, have no connection with the present time and place.”
― Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Do all people have that? A face, a phrase, a landscape, an air bubble from the past suddenly floating up as if released by the head warden's child from a cell in the brain while the mind is at work on some totally different matter? Something of the sort also occurs just before falling asleep when what you think you are thinking is not at all what you think. Or two parallel passenger trains of thought, one overtaking the other.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

“The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest— Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast.”
― William Wordsworth

“I cannot see the features right,
When on the gloom I strive to paint
The face I know; the hues are faint
And mix with hollow masks of night.

Verse LXIX”
― Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam

“Night is pleasing to us because, like memory, it erases idle details.

A New Refutation of Time”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions

“He remembered that he did have one thing going for him – his memory.”
― J.S. Mason, The Stork Ate My Brother...And Other Totally Believable Stories

“When Daddy turned back to the slim volume of Benton's poetry, and spoke the following words, I knew he was speaking from his own heart, as he said the words with a new feeling of confidence and authority. I knew those words were his words, too and that somehow Benton had spoken those same words for so many other men who could never personally say them. "...and when the enemy is; the lost, the vacant/the aimless something belched out of a vast and blind explosion/I have no heart for that/Mine is not the skill for overseeing/My hand is not the hand to wield God's flaming sword." His voice quavered brokenly with the last line, as Daddy closed the book gingerly and turned to look at me, embarrassed yet unapologetic. His face tried to smile but couldn't. The tears that had formed in his eyes clung to the dark grey lashes and reflected the light from the setting sun outside. I finally reached over and without saying anything, placed my hand over his.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy, War Stories 2015: an anthology

“The butter was real of course. Daddy had a fetish about using only real butter. As he handed it to me, I noticed the hue was brash and yellow, almost like the artificial color used in the making of cheap Margarine. The boysenberry preserves were recently purchased. The glass had a bright red foil label with intricate embossed wording and as I turned the lid, I heard the sucking sound of the seal breaking. Daddy looked over, concerned, until I carefully laid the jar of jam on the counter, pushing it toward him. "I can do everything Tweetie Bird," he said to me. I smiled, embarrassed at my old nickname from when I was a child and nodded my head.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy, War Stories 2015: an anthology

“For it is so with time and memory: the seed of our deepest feeling is buried under the rush of a momentary and violent one, there is in all feeling a quality of deception and evasion, and the meanings of the spirit become evident only in the light of a dispassionate distance,”
― Thomas Wolfe, The Good Child's River

“There is a loss that is eternally irreparable; thus eternity—even more frightful—far from wiping out the recollection of what is lost, is an eternal recollection of what is lost!”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Essential Kierkegaard

“There were times I would drive home after an extreme set of night shifts and have no recollection of the journey.”
― Steven Magee

“I have no recollection of seeing a mercury vapor detector at facilities where mercury was in use.”
― Steven Magee

“Memory, which is very sensitive and hates to be found lacking, tends to fill in any gaps with its own spurious creations of reality, but more or less in line with the facts of which it has only a vague recollection, like what remains after the passing of a shadow.”
― José Saramago, All the Names

“The butter was real of course. Daddy had a fetish about using only real butter. As he handed it to me, I noticed the hue was brash and yellow, almost like the artificial color used in the making of cheap Margarine. The boysenberry preserves were recently purchased. The glass had a bright red foil label with intricate embossed wording and as I turend the lid, I heard the sucking sound of the seal breaking. Daddy looked over, concerned, until I carefully laid the jar of jam on the counter, pushing it toward him. "I can do everything Tweetie Bird," he said to me. I smiled, embarrassed at my old nickname from when I was a child and nodded my head.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy, War Stories 2015: an anthology

“Simply being active is not life.”
― Joan Chittister, The Monastic Heart: 50 Simple Practices for a Contemplative and Fulfilling Life

“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfalteringly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
― Marcel Proust