Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Vasily Grossman

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.

Van Morrison

Memories, how they linger in the twilight and in the wee small hours sometimes just before dawn.

Rodman Philbrick

The only real treasure is in your head. Memories are better than diamonds and nobody can steal them from you

Robertson Davies

A great many complimentary things have been said about the faculty of memory, and if you look in a good quotation book you will find them neatly arranged.

Robert Southey

Where Washington hath left His awful memory A light for after times!

Robert Pattinson

I don't know what's wrong with me, My brain doesn't work anymore. I haven't any memory. I can't write. All I can do is sign my name. I tried to write the other day-it looked like I was writing in Braille.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

Robert Louis Stevenson

I've a grand memory for forgetting.

Robert Louis Stevenson

This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sun-rise, the first South Sea Island, are memories apart, and touched a virginity of sense.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The mark of a Scot of all classes [is that] he ... remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation.

Robert Emmet

A man in my situation, my lords, has not only to encounter the difficulties of fortune. and the force of power over minds which it has corrupted or subjugated. but the difficulties of established prejudice: the man dies, but his memory lives.

Robert Evans

Memories shared serve each one differently.

Robert Evans

There are three sides to every story: my side, your side, and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each one differently.

Wesley Clark

I think we're at risk with our democracy. I think we're dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame.

Wally Lamb

The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness.

Vissarion Belinsky

In science one must search for ideas. If there are no ideas, there is no science. A knowledge of facts is only valuable in so far as facts conceal ideas: facts without ideas are just the sweepings of the brain and the memory.

Walt Whitman

Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep for the dead I loved so well.

Walt Whitman

If there were nothing else of Abraham Lincoln for history to stamp him with, it is enough to send him with his wreath to the memory of all future time, that he endured that hour, that day, bitterer than gall - indeed a crucifixion day - that it did not conquer him - that he unflinchingly stemmed it, and resolved to lift himself and the Union out of it.

Saul Bellow

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

Sarah Churchwell

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

Sarah Dessen

And that was it; it was so easy for her. My own memories did not even belong to me. But I knew she was wrong. I had seen that comet. I knew it as well as I knew my own face, my own hands. My own heart.

Sarah Dessen

So many versions of just one memory, and yet none of them were right or wrong. Instead, they were all pieces. Only when fitted together, edge to edge, could they even begin to tell the whole story.

Sarah Dessen

The true story...is the realization that no time in your life is ever perfect, that even the best memories have cracks you might not see.

Sarah Dessen

It's still a memory worth having, even if it's not exactly what you imagined.