Memories Quotes - Page 31

• For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

  George Eliot

  Pain, Compassion, Middlemarch

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.6067, Delphi Classics

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• Time is a lot of the things people say that God is. There's always preexisting, and having no end. There's the notion of being all powerful-because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains, not armies. And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou art dust; and unto dust thou shalt return. And if time is anything akin to God, I suppose that memory must be the devil.

  Diana Gabaldon

  Art, Pain, Powerful

  FaceBook post by Diana Gabaldon from Apr 01, 2014

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• It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?

  Robin Hobb

  Night, Men, Flames

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• Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives. It is impressed upon the next generation, and is transmitted again to the children. Is that not an immortality worth striving for?

  Peter Kropotkin

  Children, Men, Passing Away

  Peter Kropotkin (2014). “Memoirs of a Revolutionist”, p.13, Courier Corporation

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• Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. 'Read poetry,' he wrote: 'poetry makes men better.' How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better.

  Peter Kropotkin

  Men, Letters, Sometimes

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• Memories assailed him of how gently she had spoken, touched, and moved; of how she'd loved him fiercely despite his mistakes and obsessions and weaknesses. And the conviction descended on him that love like theirs couldn't possibly suffer any change.

  Denis Johnson

  Mistake, Suffering, Weakness

  Denis Johnson (1983). “Angels”, Knopf

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• She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.

  Marguerite Duras

  Kissing, People, Mind

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• ...[T]here should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

  Anne Lamott

  Real, Feet, Imagination

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.112, Anchor

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• And your own life while it's happening to you never has any atmosphere until it's a memory.

  Andy Warhol

  Atmosphere, Photographer, Happenings

  Andy Warhol (2015). “America”, p.9, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Memory is a strange Bell—Jubilee, and Knell.

  Emily Dickinson

  Jubilee, Bells, Strange

  Emily Dickinson, Thomas Herbert Johnson, Theodora Ward (1986). “The Letters of Emily Dickinson”, p.755, Harvard University Press

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• Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

  Tim O'Brien

  Past, Night, Joining

  Tim O'Brien (1990). “The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction”

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• You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Life, Beautiful, Heart

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• Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory.

  Andrew Sean Greer

  Finding Yourself, Path, Impossible

  Andrew Sean Greer (2007). “The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel”, p.65, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Distance, Two, Yards

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• These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Past, Brideshead Revisited

  Evelyn Waugh (1958). “The world of Evelyn Waugh”

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• I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Ocean, Book, Thinking

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2005). “The Shadow of the Wind”, p.79, Penguin

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• The last light, in the last window, went out. Only the unstoppable machine of the sea still tears away at the silence with the cyclical explosion of nocturnal waves, distant memories of sleepwalking storms and the shipwrecks of dream.

  Alessandro Baricco

  Dream, Light, Sea

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• People without memory are putty.

  Naomi Klein

  People

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. August 12, 2008.

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• For several long moments we remained locked together, and I think I covered her hair with small sacred kisses, her perfume crucifying me with memories.

  Anne Rice

  Kissing, Thinking, Hair

  Anne Rice (2000). “Merrick: a novel”, Knopf Canada

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• The color white is the absence of memory.

  Stephen King

  Color White, Absence, Color

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• Each memory was brought to life before me and within me. I could not avoid them. Neither could I rationalize, explain away. I could only re-experience with total cognizance, unprotected by pretense. Self delusion was impossible, truth exposed in this blinding light. Nothing as I thought it had been. Nothing as I hoped it had been. Only as it had been.

  Richard Matheson

  Light, Self, Impossible

  Richard Matheson (1978). “What dreams may come: a novel”, Putnam Publishing Group

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• Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory.

  James Joyce

  Stars, Fire, Together

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• She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Years, Tears, Waste

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• This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.

  Umberto Eco

  Ideas, Imagination, Gold

  Umberto Eco (1995). “Name of the Rose”, p.200, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.

  Gregory Maguire

  Past, Mind, Way

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