Famous Quotes & Sayings

Vincent Van Gogh

It must be a good thing to die conscious of having performed some real good, and to know that by this work one will live, at least in the memory of some, and will have left a good example to those that come after. A work that is good-it may not be eternal, but the thought expressed in it is, and the work itself will certainly remain in existence for a long, long time; and if afterwards others arise, they can do no better than follow in the footsteps of such predecessors and do their work in the same way.

Walter Benjamin

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Walter Benjamin

The work of memory collapses time.

Walter Benjamin

Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

Walter Benjamin

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

Walter Benjamin

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was"...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

Walter Benjamin

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

Virginia Woolf

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

Werner Herzog

For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.

Wale

I'd love a super human memory. My memory has never been good.

Wallace Stegner

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

Samuel Beckett

I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.

Samuel Butler

Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die.

Samuel Beckett

The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.

Samuel Beckett

It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter.

Samuel Beckett

Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.

Salman Rushdie

...in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I'm afraid, with the shadows of imperfections.

Salman Rushdie

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

Salman Rushdie

Our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets...My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility , the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind.

Salman Rushdie

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

Rudolf Steiner

We create the possibility for a better human form in our next life if during our jamaloca existence after death, when we still have an astral body, we can have memories connected with music.

W. P. Kinsella

1946, if my memory is correct. Harry "The Cat" Brecheen went against the Red Sox in Game 7. I stayed home to listen, practically had my head inside the radio.

W. G. Sebald

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.

W. G. Sebald

At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory.

W. G. Sebald

In my photographic work I was always especially entranced... by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them.

W. G. Sebald

...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

W. G. Sebald

One has the impression that something is stirring inside [photographs] - it is as if one can hear little cries of despair, gémissements de désespoir... as if the photographs themselves had a memory and were remembering us and how we, the surviving, and those who preceded us, once were.

W. S. Merwin

part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

W. S. Gilbert

I shall carry to the Catacombs of Age, Photographically lined On the tablet of my mind

W. H. Auden

Christ did not enchant men; He demanded that they believe in Him: except on one occasion, the Transfiguration. For a brief while, Peter, James, and John were permitted to see Him in His glory. For that brief while they had no need of faith. The vision vanished, and the memory of it did not prevent them from all forsaking Him when He was arrested, or Peter from denying that he had ever known Him.

W. H. Auden

Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place;

Wayne Gretzky

When people come up to me and say, "I was at your Game 7 in the playoffs in Toronto," or, "I saw your first goal in the NHL," that triggers memories. But I don't sit around my kitchen table and tell my kids, "You know, one year I got 92 goals."

Tove Jansson

Smell is important. It reminds a person of all the things he's been through; it is a sheath of memories and security.