Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes

Memory is the best of all gardens. Therein, winter and summer, the seeds of their past lie dormant, ready to spring into instant bloom at any moment the mind wishes to bring them to life.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.

She said I bet you dont remember me And I said only every other memory.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

Vision sometimes comes in a memory.

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all. As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.

But sometimes what we call 'memory' and what we call 'imagination' are not so easily distinguished.

From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.

Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.

The best Paris I know now is in my head.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

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

You get to a point in your life where you go, 'I don't remember what I did.'

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

memory is the only way home.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.