"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin."
— Sara Zarr

"XVII

The days aren't discarded or collected, they are bees
that burned with sweetness or maddened
the sting: the struggle continues,
the journeys go and come between honey and pain.
No, the net of years doesn't unweave: there is no net.
They don't fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.
Sleep doesn't divide life into halves,
or action, or silence, or honor:
life is like a stone, a single motion,
a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,
an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metal
that climbs or descends burning in your bones."
— Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)

"Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough."
— T.S. Eliot

"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depths of some devine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson

"The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime."
— Pink Floyd, "Free Four"

"There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long."
— Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping: A Novel)

"The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened."
— Mark Twain

"Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it."
— L.M. Montgomery (The Story Girl)

"Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."
— Saul Bellow

"XVI

Each in the most hidden sack kept
the lost jewels of memory,
intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,
the fragment of public or private happiness.
A few,the wolves, collected thighs,
other men loved the dawn scratching
mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.
For me happiness was to share singing,
praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.
I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:
my life had no use on earth.

(translated by William O'Daly)"
— Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)

"Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little."
— Samuel Beckett

"He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Unhappy memories are persistent. They're specific, and it's the details that refuse to leave us alone. Though a happy memory may stay with you just as long as one that makes you miserable, what you remember softens over time. What you recall is simply that you were happy, not necessarily the individual moments that brought about your joy.

But the memory of something painful does just the opposite. It retains its original shape, all bony fingers and pointy elbows. Every time it returns, you get a quick poke in the eye or jab in the stomach. The memory of being unhappy has the power to hurt us long after the fact. We feel the injury anew each and every time we think of it."
— Cameron Dokey (Belle: A Retelling of "Beauty and the Beast")

"People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die."
— Haruki Murakami

"It is...difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.

[E]very memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long."
— Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping: A Novel)

"For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion."
— George Eliot (Middlemarch)

"Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"The smells of Christmas are the smells of childhood [p. 53]"
— Richard Paul Evans (The Christmas Box)

"The only real treasure is in your head. Memories are better than diamonds and nobody can steal them from you"
— Rodman Philbrick (The Last Book In The Universe)

"Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason."
— Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression)

"Memory is the diary we all carry about with us."
— Oscar Wilde

"In this world of memories, there's no need for strangers.
-Kenshin to Kaoru"
— Watsuki Nobuhiro

""These images will become memories, and those memories will become scars, but scars only make you tougher.""
— Lise Bennett

"The ground was silvery, as if some stars had fallen there."
— Heather O'Neill

"I take you and pile high the memories. Death will break her claws on some I keep."
— Carl Sandburg

"It was-this always seems to shock people all over again- a happy childhood. For the first few months I spent a lot of time at the bottom of the garden, crying till I threw up and yelling rude words at the neighborhood kids who tried to make friends. But children are pragmatic, they come alive and kicking out of a whole lot worse than orphanhood, and I could only hold out so long against the fact that nothing would bring my parents back and against the thousand vivid things around me, Emma-next-door hanging over the wall and my new bike glinting red in the sunshine and the half-wild kittens in the garden shed, all fidgeting insistently while they waited for me to wake up again and come out to play. I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've lost. "
— Tana French (The Likeness: A Novel)

"Of all that I have possessed in my life, my memories are the only things remaining to me. Indeed, I believe that memories are the only real treasure any human can hope to hold always."
— Gary Jennings (Aztec)

"The harmony of two bodies expressed in this single touch, bridging their differences and bending their moral reserve, was as powerful and wild as
physical fulfillment, yet there was nothing false in this harmony, no
illusion created that just by touching, our bodies could express feelings
that rationality prevented us from making permanent; I might even say that
our bodies cooly preserved their good sense, scheming and keeping each
other in check, as if to say, I'll yield unreservedly to the madness of
the moment but only if and when you do the same; but this physical plea
for passion and reason, spontaneity and calculation, closeness and
distance, took our bodies past the point where, clinging to desire and
striving for the moment of gratification, they would seek a new and more complete harmony."
— Peter Nadas (Libro Del Recuerdo)

"It was easy not to think of my future; I didn't have one."
— James Ellroy

"...I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them..."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"We don’t even survive in the memories of the living. Science has destroyed that myth. Whenever we remember something, what we’re doing is remembering the last time we remembered it; our memory doesn’t go back to the original notch, the first one was cut, but to the last one. Human memory is virtual, like that of a computer. When we open a file we’re not opening it as it was when we first created it, but as it was the last time we used it. It is called hypercathexis and is our brain’s most sophisticated recourse when it comes to confronting pain.” "
— Enrique de Hériz (Lies)

""Bruises fade, but the pain of memories lasts forever.""
— Lise Bennett

"The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or inspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, if not back to your own neighborhood. To the street where you live. To things you left behind.
And that's what you need, what you needed al along."
— Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude)

"Like all of my important memories, it has a potency that has influenced the pocket of time that holds it, so I can remember that particular Saturday afternoon, even though in many ways it was no different from any other. I can remember, for example, what van der Glick was wearing as she stepped out of the elevator, which was a dress covered with clownish polka dots. Rainie would make these heartbreaking stabs at femininity; indeed, she still does. It's not that she doesn't possess a woman's body now, and didn't posses a girl's body then. But clothes never seemed to fit her correctly, and the more girlish they were, the worse they would hang."
— Paul Quarrington (The Ravine)

"Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them. "
— P. G. Wodehouse

""Ponder well on this point: the pleasant hours of our life are all connected by a more or less tangible link, with some memory of the table."
"
— Charles Pierre Monselet (1825-1888)

"Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it."
— Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping: A Novel)