Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Isaac Asimov

There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.

Isaac Asimov

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

Ella Baker

I'm sure, out of the context here of Stanley Levison's relationship with the Jewish liberal forces, that had made contributions. I remember one such contribution before they moved from Montgomery. An associate in the real estate business with Stanley had lost a son in the war, and she wanted to do something in memory of him. So, she made available certain monies to be used by the emerging leadership there in Montgomery. I'm sure other individuals did.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Back on its golden hinges The gate of Memory swings, And my heart goes into the garden And walks with the olden things.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Everyone complains of his memory, and nobody complains of his judgment.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

People always complain about their memories, never about their minds.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Every one complains of a poor memory, no one of a weak judgment.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Everyone blames his memory, no one blames his judgment.

Francis Spufford

If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t hassle a browser – and steal the contents of books by reading them. I drank down 1984 while loitering in the 'O' section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping vessel of my attention carefully out of the shop.

Ian MacKaye

I feel quite connected to the past, and my memory. Everything that I've ever done I can still relate to, and feel connected to it in a way. There's no part of my life that I look at and go, 'I don't recognize that person at all.

Ian Mcewan

These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.