Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.
—Oscar Wilde
And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
—John Steinbeck
In memory everything seems to happen to music.
—Tennessee Williams
I can understand that memory must be selective, else it would choke on the glut of experience. What I cannot understand is why it selects what it does
—Virginia Peterson
A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.
—Doug Larson
History fades into fable, fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy, the inscription molders from the tablet, the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids—what are they but heaps of sand, and their epitaphs but characters written in the dust?
—Washington Irving
There’s things that happen in a person’s life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there’s no forgetting them.
—John Boyne in Mutiny on the Bounty
Once you love something, you always love it in some way. You have to. It’s, like, part of you for good.
—Sarah Dessen in What Happened to Goodbye
For me, it was almost like winter didn’t count. Summer was what mattered. My whole life was measured in summers.
—Jenny Han in The Summer I Turned Pretty
It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
—John Updike in My Father’s Tears and Other Stories
They tell you you’ll forget how it used to be. You’ll get used to it, that it’s better to move on. They don’t realize you can’t. You’re not the same person anymore.
—Amanda Sun in Ink
However often marriage is dissolved, it remains indissoluble. Real divorce, the divorce of heart and nerve and fiber, does not exist, since there is no divorce from memory.
—Virginia Peterson
It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember.
—Eugene McCarthy
No matter what anybody says about grief, and about time healing all wounds, the truth is, there are certain sorrows that never fade away until the heart stops beating and the last breath is taken.
—Tiffanie DeBartolo in God-Shaped Hole
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
—John Kenneth Galbraith