Quotes about Memory

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything

That which I have seen, in that little moment, will never go out from my memory, but will abide there; and I shall see it all the days, and dream of it all the nights, till I die. Would God I had been blind!

I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.

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

My memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges.

We don not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare, and the the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has passed away.

And if I have now been compelled to make a clear statement of his career it is due to those injudicious champions who have endeavoured to clear his memory by attacks upon him whom I shall ever regard as the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.

We sometimes forget even what we have done, so how much more what we have thought.

More than twenty years later I meet Muriel at a poetry reading at a women's coffee-house in New York. Her voice is still soft, but her great brown eyes are not. I tell her, "I am writing an unfolding of my life and loves." "Just make sure you tell the truth about me," she says.

I don't know how long I looked for Toni every day at noontime, sitting on the stoop. Eventually, her image receded into that place from which all my dreams are made.

Death folds the corners of my mouth into a heart-shaped star. It sits on my tongue like a stone around which your name blossoms distorted. — Audre Lorde, from "Speechless," The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde . (W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition February 17, 2000)