Memory – the very skin of life.

Willa Cather:

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

Mary H. Waldrip:

Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.

Amelia E. Barr:

I wear the key of memory, and can open every door in the house of my life.

Jessamyn West:

Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.

Virgilia Peterson:

I can understand that memory must be selective, else it would choke on the glut of experience. What I cannot understand is why it selects what it does.

Carrie Fisher:

I remember what was missing instead of what was there. I am a chronicler of absence.

Patricia Hampl:

In memory each of us is an artist:

each of us creates.

Katherine Mansfield:

There can be no harm / In just remembering – that is all.

Christina Baldwin:

How we remember, what we remember, and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality.

Mari Sandoz:

The hills of one’s youth are all mountains.

Harriet Doerr:

Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.

Barbara Kingsolver:

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.

Amy Tan:

I can never remember things I didn’t understand in the first place.

Lucille Clifton:

They ask me to remember / but they want me to remember / their memories / and I keep on remembering / mine.

Gertrude Atherton:

The irony of life is not that you cannot forget but that you can.

Edith Konecky:

I have a terrible memory; I never forget a thing.

Helen MacInnes:

Just remember enough never to be vulnerable again:

total forgetting could be as self-destructive as complete remembering.

Agatha Christie:

I think, myself, that one’s memories represent those moments which, insignificant as they may seem, nevertheless represent the inner self and oneself as most really oneself.

Patricia Hampl:

Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.

Elizabeth Bowen:

Memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.