Lapham’s Quarterly

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.

Memory is more indelible than ink.

Time robs us of all, even of memory.

There’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year.

Anything one is remembering is a repetition, but existing as a human being that is being, listening, and hearing is never repetition.

Memory is the only
afterlife I can understand.

Pictures made in childhood are painted in bright hues.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.

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.

There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time in the midst of wretchedness.

God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.

To endeavor to forget anyone is a certain way of thinking of nothing else.

I 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.

History is a people’s memory, and without a memory man is demoted to the level of the lower animals.

One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.

I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.

Memories are hunting horns
whose noise dies away in the wind.

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things, and once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.

Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.

Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Some memories are like lucky charms, talismans, one shouldn’t tell about them or they’ll lose their power.

A monument is money wasted. My memory will live on if my life has deserved it.

I have a terrible memory; I never forget a thing.

Memory is like the moon, which hath its new, its full, and its wane.

What is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

Someone will remember us
I say
even in another time.

Memory is necessary for all operations of reasoning.

Everyone complains about his memory, and no one complains about his judgment.

He who is afraid of his own memories is cowardly, really cowardly.

We 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.

Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe—though we didn’t know it at the time.

Anyone who in discussion quotes authority uses his memory rather than his intellect.