"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"Forbidden to Remember. Terrified to Forget."
— Stephenie Meyer (New Moon)

"Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before."
— Steven Wright

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

"Memory is the happiness of being alone."
— Lois Lowry (Anastasia Krupnik)

"If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes"
— Vladimir Nabokov

"One lives in the hope of becoming a memory."
— Antonio Porchia

"i can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. it expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. "
— Virginia Woolf

"Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered."
— W.H. Auden

"Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~Candle"
— Gregory Maguire (Son of a Witch: A Novel)

"There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened."
— Harold Pinter

"I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Memories of My Melancholy Whores)

"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction--they're all just fuel."
— Haruki Murakami (After Dark)

"Touch has a memory."
— John Keats

"How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richards kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.

Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe its as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the ponds edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together.

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)

"I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot. "
— Ann Brashares (Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood)

"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."
— William Faulkner (Light in August)

"The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this."
— Paul Auster (The Invention of Solitude)

"Every man's memory is his private literature."
— Aldous Huxley

"She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.

"
— Graham Greene

"Harold Hill: You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. I don't know about you, but I'd like to make today worth remembering."
— Meredith Willson (The Music Man)

"there are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

"
— harold pinter (old times)

"Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!"
— Edgar Allan Poe

" "A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away." -E. Welty"
— E. Welty

"Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

"You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving."
— Amy Carmichael

"the cradle rocks above an abyss and the common sense tell us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."
— Nabokov

"In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the same of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold."
— John Leonard

"Still around the corner there may wait a secret road or a hidden gate,
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day shall come at last when I
shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun!"
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"Her memory's your love. You want no other."
— Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)

"there are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened."
— harold pinter (old times)

"[...] man's memory shapes
Its own Eden within [...]"
— Jorge Luis Borges (Dreamtigers)

"Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while."
— William Butler Yeats

"If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. Time: the whisper beneath that word is death. With this unanswerable weight hanging heavier and heavier over one's head, the vision becomes cloudy, nothing is what it seems...
How then, can I trust my memory concerning that particular Sunday afternoon?...Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true--anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other--beneath the face of the beloved, however ancient, ruined, and scarred, is the face of the baby your love once was, and will always be, for you. Love serves, then, if memory doesn't, and passion, apart from its tense relation to agony, labors beneath the shadow of death. Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you're out there in the craft of your mortality, alone."
— James Baldwin (Just Above My Head)

"Reiko had not kept a diary and was now denied the pleasure of assiduously rereading her record of the happiness of the past few months and consigning each page to the fire as she did so.

- Death in Midsummer and Other Stories"
— Yukio Mishima (Patriotism)

"...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see."
— Doris Lessing

"Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope."
— George Eliot (Daniel Deronda)

"Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray."
— Michael Ignatieff (Scar Tissue)

"[D]as Gedächtnis [ist] schwach und der Lauf eines Lebens kurz und alles [geschieht] so rasch, dass wir den Zusammenhang zwischen den Ereignissen nicht mehr sehen, die Folgen der Taten nicht mehr ermessen können, wir glauben an die Fiktion der Zeit, an Gegenwart, Vergangenheit und Zukunft, aber es kann auch sein, dass alles gleichzeitig geschieht [...]"
— Isabel Allende (La casa de los espíritus)

""You can clean your sword as much as you want but the blood still stains it.""
— Matsuro