Famous Quotes & Sayings

Sara Paretsky

I have one vivid memory of one of the days that the marches were taking place. We were in a Catholic, predominantly Polish and Lithuanian neighborhood. Chicago is a place where people define themselves by their parish and by their ethnicity.

Sara Gruen

The more distressing the memory, the more persistent it's presence.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Memory, bosom-spring of joy.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

Samuel Johnson

We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because for a time they are not remembered; he may, therefore, justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind.

Samuel Johnson

He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day will often bring to his task attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topic till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce.

Samuel Johnson

To paint things as they are requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy.

Sarah Polley

I think it’s a universal thing in every family, that people have their own specific versions of pivotal events or even small memories,

Virgil

No day shall erase you from the memory of time

Willard Gaylin

We occupy a space of our own creation-a collage compounded by bits and pieces of actuality arranged into a design determined by our internal perceptions, our hopes, our fears, our memories, and our anticipations.

Willa Cather

The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen again.

Willa Cather

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

Warren Ellis

What if I left my memory in the future and I have to catch up to it?

Warren Buffett

A home is one of the most important assets that most people will ever buy. Homes are also where memories are made and you want to work with someone you can trust.

Vivienne Westwood

I've got a terrible memory; it's probably because I'm always concentrating on what I'm doing now.

Vincent Van Gogh

I often think of you all, one cannot do what one wants in life. The more you feel attached to a spot, the more ruthlessly you are compelled to leave it, but the memories remain, and one remembers - as in a looking glass, darkly - one's absent friends.

Vincent Van Gogh

The wheat field has ...poetry; it is like a memory of something one has once seen. We can only make our pictures speak.

Vincent Van Gogh

We are having wind and rain here, and I am very glad not to be alone. I work from memory on bad days, and that would not do if I were alone.

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.

William Godwin

Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.

William Golding

His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.

William Goldman

People don't remember me. Really. It's not a paranoid thing; I just have this habit of slipping through memories. It doesn't bother me all that much, except I guess that's a lie; it does. For some reason, I test very high on forgettability.