Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.

~From the television show The Wonder Years

Y

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.

~Edward de Bono

Y

Every man's memory is his private literature.

~Aldous Huxley

Y

God gave us memories that we might have roses in December.

~J.M. Barrie, Courage, 1922

Y

Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.

~Austin O'Malley

Y

Memory is a child walking along a seashore.

You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things.

~Pierce Harris, Atlanta Journal

Y

We do not remember days; we remember moments.

~Cesare Pavese, The Burning Brand

Y

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory. ~Josh Billings

Y

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.

~Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest"

Y

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

~P.D. James

Y

And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?

~Rainer Maria Rilke

Y

The leaves of memory seemed to make

A mournful rustling in the dark.

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Y

Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume.

~Jean de Boufflers

Y

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;

One need not be a house;

The brain has corridors surpassing

Material place.

~Emily Dickinson, "Time and Eternity"

Y

I have memories - but only a fool stores his past in the future.

~David Gerrold

Y

A happy childhood can't be cured.

Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.

~Hortense Calisher, Queenie, 1971

Y

Everybody needs his memories.

They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

~Saul Bellow

Y

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

~George Santayana, The Life of Reason

Y

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it.

It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.

~Carol Shields

Y

It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?

~Lord Byron

Y

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

~Cynthia Ozick

Y

The past is never dead, it is not even past.

~William Faulkner

Y
The existence of forgetting has never been proved:

We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Y

Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.

~Thomas Fuller

Y

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

~T.S. Eliot

Y

Memory is what tells a man that his wife's birthday was yesterday.

~Mario Rocco

Y

To live in hearts we leave behind

Is not to die.

~Thomas Campbell, Hallowed Ground

Y

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

~John Updike

Y

Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.

~Seneca

Y

Life is a rough biography.

Memories smooth out the edges.

~Dante G. Roque

Y

Nothing is more memorable than a smell.

One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains;

another, a moonlit beach;

a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town.

Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.

~Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

Y

I am a miser of my memories of you

And will not spend them.

~Witter Bynner, "Coins"

Y

The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory.

~Author Unknown

Y

The sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that had left the conscious mind.

~Thalassa Cruso, To Everything There is a Season, 1973

Y

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

~Samuel Johnson

Y

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

~Salvador Dali

Y

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

~Michel de Montaigne

Y

The faintest waft is sometimes enough to induce feelings of hunger or anticipation, or to transport you back through time and space to a long-forgotten moment in your childhood. It can overwhelm you in an instant or simply tease you, creeping into your consciousness slowly and evaporating almost the moment it is detected.

~Stephen Lacey, Scent in Your Garden, 1991

Y

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.

~Frank Deford

Y

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Y

Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories.

~From the movie An Affair to Remember

Y

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Y

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Y

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.

~Diane Sawyer

Y

To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward.

~Margaret Fairless Barber, The Roadmender

Y