Anything one is remembering is a repetition, but existing as a human being that is being, listening, and hearing is never repetition.
—Gertrude Stein, 1935Quotes
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Everyone complains about his memory, and no one complains about his judgment.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1666The true art of memory is the art of attention.
—Samuel Johnson, 1759I have a terrible memory; I never forget a thing.
—Edith Konecky, 1976We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
—Marcel Proust, c. 1922I think heaven will not be as good as earth, unless it bring with it that sweet power to remember, which is the staple of heaven here.
—Emily Dickinson, 1879Memories are hunting horns
whose noise dies away in the wind.
The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chawing a hunk of melon in the dust.
—Elizabeth Bowen, 1955Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.
—Harriet Doerr, 1978One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.
—Phyllis Rose, 1991To endeavor to forget anyone is a certain way of thinking of nothing else.
—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.
—Barbara Kingsolver, 1990