Famous Quotes & Sayings

Iris Dement

And I've been walking 'round with memories way too long.

Irvin D. Yalom

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

Irvine Welsh

But even Es and cocaine, over the years they blow holes in your brain, rob you of your memories, your past. Which is fair enough, convenient even.

Iris Murdoch

Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms simple and calm and blessed which we saw once in a pure, clear light being pure ourselves.

Immanuel Velikovsky

On the day I was born, or possibly on one of the following days, my father went on a walk in the forested hills and thought of a name for me. His first son was called Daniel, and Samuel in memory of one of his forefathers.

Igor Stravinsky

One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.

Ida Tarbell

One of the permanent possessions of the human heart is the memory of its noble enthusiasms.

I. F. Stone

If you live long enough, you get accused of things you never did and praised for virtues you never had.

Huston Smith

...but with my clamoring ego solidly in place, I considered the title, 'Memories of a Failed Nobody'.

Huston Smith

After his great awakening, the Buddha continued to meditate and to devote himself to others; otherwise his vision would have receded into a pleasant memory.

Gregory Maguire

What had survived - maybe all that had survived of Trism - was Liir's sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smell of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression - unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Liir's heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism's glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing.

James Frey

I, however, like black. It is a color that makes me comfortable and the color with which I have the most experience. In the darkest darkness, all is black. In the deepest hole, all is black. In the terror of my Addicted mind, all is black. In the empty periods of my lost memory, all is black. I like black, goddammit, and I am going to give it its due.

James Frey

I go to my Room and I drink and I smoke some cigarettes and I think about her. I drink and I smoke and I think about her and at a certain point blackness comes and my memory fails me.

James Carroll

Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.

James Carroll

Telling our stories is what saves us. The story is enough... The very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of narrative is, by definition, holy.

James Carroll

The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Memory is not what the heart desires.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror, be it clear as Kheled-zaram. Or so says the heart of Gimli the Dwarf.

J. R. R. Tolkien

There was a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it, as though a chink in the dark: light out of the past. It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice agin, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to.

J. R. R. Tolkien

In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.

J. R. R. Tolkien

One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them. Filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present : like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but I t felt as if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between roof-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Great engines crawled across the field; and in the midst was a huge ram, great as a forest-tree a hundred feet in length, swinging on mighty chains. Long had it been forging in the dark smithies of Mordor, and its hideous head, founded of black steel, was shaped in the likeness of a ravening wolf; on it spells of ruin lay. Grond they named it, in memory of the Hammer of the Underworld of old. Great beasts drew it, orcs surrounded it, and behind walked mountain-trolls to wield it.

Iyanla Vanzant

Until you make peace with your difficult memories, that pain will continue to bleed into your current and future experiences.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Literature is the memory of humanity.

Isaac Marion

Writing isn't letters on paper. It's communication. It's memory.

Isaac Marion

All the shitty stuff people do to themselves... it can all be the same thing, you know? Just a way to drown out your own voice. To kill your memories without having to kill yourself.

Isaac Marion

What happened to the world was gradual. I've forgotten what it actually was, but I have faint, fetal memories of what it was like. A smoldering dread that never really caught fire till there wasn't much left to burn. Each sequential step surprised us. Then one day we woke up, and everything was gone.

Isaac Marion

That's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory— hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can built off our pasts and make future.

Isaac Marion

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

I want a new past,new memories, a new first handshake with love. I want to start over in every possible way.

Isaac Asimov

I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death

Isaac Asimov

The soft bonds of love are indifferent to life and death. They hold through time so that yesterday’s love is part of today’s and the confidence in tomorrow’s love is also part of today’s. And when one dies, the memory lives in the other, and is warm and breathing. And when both die - I almost believe, rationalist though I am - that somewhere it remains, indestructible and eternal, enriching all of the universe by the mere fact that once it existed.