Famous Quotes & Sayings

Julian Barnes

What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?' 'History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly. 'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. ... 'Finn?' '"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." (quoting Patrick Lagrange)

Julian Barnes

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.

Julian Barnes

Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

Julian Barnes

Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

Ken Kesey

Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery.

Ken Kesey

I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.

Keith Urban

Take your records, take you freedom, take your memories, I dont need 'em. And take your cat, and leave my sweater, cause we've got nothing left to weather.

Keith Olbermann

I guess the painkillers wipe out your memory along with your ethics.

Kristanna Loken

Your body has such a memory.

Kim Harrison

Memories of ice and Trent surfaced, and I wrapped my arms around my middle. I had saved him, and he had saved me. What was wrong with us?

Kevin Powers

Noises and smells, those can bring back powerful memories. I remember when I was going to school one Fourth of July, and there were a lot of fireworks going off. I knew that I was in Richmond. I knew that I was a college student. But I thought people were shooting at me.

Ken Tucker

The mists of nostalgia color memory.

Ken Thompson

I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it's coupled with file systems.

Mark Twain

It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss.

Mark Twain

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy--that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

Mark Twain

A pilot must have a memory developed to absolute perfection. But there are two higher qualities which he also must have. He must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake.

Mary Roach

In the words of the late Francis Crick...You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (13)

Mary Roberts Rinehart

[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

Of all our sorrows, memory is the worst.

Was memory always as much of a burden as it could sometimes be a blessing.

Martin Gardner

The greatest scandal of the century in American psychiatry ... is the growing mania among thousands of inept therapists, family counselors, and social workers for arousing false memories of childhoood sexual abuse.

Martin Farquhar Tupper

Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?

Mark E. Smith

My earliest memory is learning to read 'Muffin the Mule' when I was about three.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

Nicole Williams

I try to keep the happy memories. If that's what you call selective memories, I'm good with that.

Niecy Nash

Celebrate your child's achievement, then rotate it when the next mini-masterpiece comes along. Then chuck the old picture. Don't worry that you're throwing away a memory. Your children will remember your praise more than they will remember the picture with macaroni and glitter glued on it.

Nicole Krauss

I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I-he-none of us-would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she'd built a world out of them she knew how to survive on even if no one else could.

Nicole Krauss

Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.

Nicole Krauss

I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.

Nick Hornby

Did you know that Jacques Benveniste, one of the world's leading homeopathic 'scientists', now claims that you can email homeopathic remedies? Yeah, see, what you do is you can take the 'memory' of the diluted substance out of the water electromagnetically, put it on your computer, email it, and play it back on a sound card into new water. I mean, that could work, right?

Nick Hornby

When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories are pretty much the same thing. It is all just emotion in the end. And any of it can make you weep.

Mary McAleese

That past is still within our living memory, a time when neighbour helped neighbour, sharing what little they had out of necessity, as well as decency.

Mary McAleese

Here is a shared memory that we didn't share, forgot to share, for almost ninety years.