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Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose. --From the television show The Wonder Years

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. --Edward de Bono

Every man's memory is his private literature. --Aldous Huxley

God gave us memories that we might have roses in December. --J.M. Barrie, Courage, 1922

Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food. --Austin O'Malley

Memory is a child walking along a seashore.  You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things. --Pierce Harris, Atlanta Journal

We do not remember days; we remember moments. --Cesare Pavese, The Burning Brand

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory. --Josh Billings

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us. --Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest"

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life. --P.D. James

And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? --Rainer Maria Rilke

The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume. --Jean de Boufflers

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
--Emily Dickinson, "Time and Eternity"

I have memories - but only a fool stores his past in the future. --David Gerrold

A happy childhood can't be cured.  Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose. --Hortense Calisher, Queenie, 1971

Everybody needs his memories.  They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. --Saul Bellow

Memory itself is an internal rumour. --George Santayana, The Life of Reason

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it.  It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction. --Carol Shields

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? --Lord Byron

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. --Cynthia Ozick

The past is never dead, it is not even past. --William Faulkner
The existence of forgetting has never been proved:  We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them. --Friedrich Nietzsche
Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories.  Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart. --Thomas Fuller

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
--T.S. Eliot

Memory is what tells a man that his wife's birthday was yesterday. --Mario Rocco

To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.
--Thomas Campbell, Hallowed Ground

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified. --John Updike

Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember. --Seneca

Life is a rough biography.  Memories smooth out the edges. --Terri Guillemets

Nothing is more memorable than a smell.  One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town.  Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.  Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once.  A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. --Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

I am a miser of my memories of you
And will not spend them.
--Witter Bynner, "Coins"

The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory. --Author Unknown

The sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that had left the conscious mind. --Thalassa Cruso, To Everything There is a Season, 1973

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution. --Samuel Johnson

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels:  it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. --Salvador Dali

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. --Michel de Montaigne

The faintest waft is sometimes enough to induce feelings of hunger or anticipation, or to transport you back through time and space to a long-forgotten moment in your childhood.  It can overwhelm you in an instant or simply tease you, creeping into your consciousness slowly and evaporating almost the moment it is detected. --Stephen Lacey, Scent in Your Garden, 1991

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes. --Frank Deford

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time. --Friedrich Nietzsche

Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories. --From the movie An Affair to Remember

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time. --Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. --Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact. --Diane Sawyer

To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward. --Margaret Fairless Barber, The Roadmender