You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it; it is by nature self-erasing; you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.
—E. L. Doctorow
Holding onto something that is good for you now, may be the very reason why you don't have something better.
—C. JoyBell C.
It doesn't make sense to dwell on things you can't do anything about.
—Cinda Williams Chima in The Sorcerer Heir
Your touch will completely erase all the times he touched me. Once you lay your hands on my skin, I won't be able to remember anyone but you.
—Cambria Hebert in Text
I hope that when I die, people say about me, 'Boy, that guy sure owed me a lot of money.
—Jack Handey
The true art of memory is the art of attention.
—Samuel Johnson
You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.
—John Green in Turtles All the Way Down
One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
—Rita Mae Brown
Nostalgia is a way of remembering people and places and things, and wishing things hadn't changed. It has a sweetness to it.
—Linda Lael Miller in Creed's Honor
This was the kind of kiss you remembered when you were a very old lady with a very poor memory.
—Valerie Bowman in The Untamed Earl
Your mind has a way of not letting you forget things you wish you could. Especially with people. Like, you'll always try your best to forget things that people say to you or about you, but you always remember. And you'll try to forget things you've seen that no one should see, but you just can't do it.
—John Corey Whaley in Where Things Come Back
We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.
—Tom Stoppard
I have not spoken to him for ten years, but I thought of him every single day.
—Ruth Ware in Dark Wood
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
—Ogden Nash