Erich Maria Remarque Quotes

It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?

Remembrances last longer than present realities.

Every little job becomes a dream, and you don't recall it anymore, and maybe you might have a deja vu moment, but it's like something you dreamed earlier.

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.

In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.

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.

My memory is so bad that many times I forget my own name.

Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.

We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what really was, what it meant.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

Did you ever think about all of the nights you lived through and can't remember The ones that were so mundane your brain just didn't bother to record them. Hundreds, maybe thousands of nights come and go without being preserved by our memory. Does that ever freak you out? Like maybe your mind recorded all of the wrong nights?

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.

Sometimes memory tricks you. Sometimes beauty is best when it's distant.

To learn from experience, we must remember it, and, for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend.

Yea from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records.

I always feel like I'm forgetting things.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

I wish I had a memory of that first violent shove, the shock of cold air, the sting of oxygen into new lungs. Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.

You can't give any exciting speech without misremembering things.