Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

The years leech at a man's memories, even those he has vowed never to forget.

there was a time when these weren't memories.

I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates.

Visiting old haunts is hard on memory. Things shrink, change, and disappear.

It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can't even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of better and worse. It's simply a matter of is and is no longer.

It is curious to note how fragile the memory is, even for the important times in one's life. This is, moreover, what explains the fortunate fantasy of history.

It's been 25 years now, and truthfully, time sometimes blurs the memory.

The strange thing about living somewhere for a couple of years and then moving on and not returning is that those locations become ghosts of themselves in your mind.

Experience had taught me that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time.

I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.

The snapshots had become almost as dim as memories.

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

But it's far too late for us; ring, hair, letters, photographs - all traces of our love will be scattered then, like an anagram.

There is nothing that makes a man more self-satisfied than a poor memory.

The past is never where you think you left it.

We couldn't understand because we were too far... and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, those ages that had gone, leaving hardly a sign... and no memories.

Memory, the priestess, kills the present and offers its heart to the shrine of the dead past.

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.

Day by day and night by night we were together - all else has long been forgotten by me.

The memory fades, and I’m left hanging on to the ghosts of his words.

Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.

But I didn't frame it; I put into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose her. There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulders. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

Maybe the past is supposed to fade-and that's actually a kindness of human memory.

What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?