Erich Maria Remarque Quotes

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now,the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Memories are not recycled like atoms and particles in quantum physics; they can be lost forever.

Everytime you grab at love you will lose a snowflake of your memory

Memory is a tenuous thing, like a rainbow's end or a camera with a failing lens.

You have to make a decision, what you want to do in life, ... Your deal can be, you can leave tomorrow. Soon as you leave, you will be forgotten.

Goldfish have no memory, I guess their lives are much like mine. And the little plastic castle is a surprise everytime.

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

I can't say I was consciously thinking of the big changes in the music business when I was writing the lyrics, but change, uncertainty, flux, impermanence - these are things I'm acutely aware of. And I enjoy facing it all.

But memory is an autumn leaf that murmurs a while in the wind and then is heard no more.

I have a terrible memory because I'm not interested in the past. It's done, it's done.

Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory.

I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.

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

Hey, if you can't remember, don't worry about it. I'm having a few memory problems myself in this place. Little things like how long I've been here, what my purpose in life is, which feet to put my shoes on. Stuff like that.

Maybe the memory does play tricks. Increasingly, I'm thinking, 'What was their name? I knew that name yesterday.' I think that's what happens. At some point, I'll forget that I ever worked with Peter Cook, I suppose, and Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller.

They would think she was savoring the taste (blueberries, cinnamon, cream-excellent), but she was actually savoring the whole morning, trying to catch it, pin it down, keep it safe before all those precious moments became yet another memory.

If we could wake each morning with no memory of living before we went to sleep, we might arrive at a faultless day.

This is how memories are; what seems so clear and unforgettable at one moment vanishes like steam the next.

The past is never where you think you left it.

The ability to forget the past enables people to free themselves gradually from the pain they once suffered; but it also often makes them repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.

I have terrible short-term memory loss, which I like to think of as Presidential eligibility.

Sydney discovers that she minds the loss of her mourning. When she grieved, she felt herself to be intimately connected to Daniel. But with each passing day, he floats away from her. When she thinks about him now, it is more as a lost possibility than as a man. She has forgotten his breath, his musculature.