Even in forgetting there is an aspect of recollection, a faded few moments of wispy consciousness clung like webs in high-vaulted chambers, moving ever so lightly with the draft.

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t.

I prefer to rely on my memory. I have lived with that memory a long time, I am used to it, and if I have rearranged or distorted anything, surely that was done for my own benefit.

No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors… This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.

For now I sit on my final island of the present as my radius of memory shrinks; lost already are the islands of work, of old friendships...Other islands fade as I brood upon them.

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.

My mom used to say that’s why we have memory. And the opposite of memory—hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.

I saw [Linus Pauling] as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century’s greatest chemist. No doubt about it.

He thought of his remembrance of Jordan, thought of how it hurt to even look at Isabelle and Clary. Without memory, they were lost. And nobody wanted someone they loved to be lost.

The soft strings of the lute rippled with memories, and the maid's lilting voice made Mary sigh as she closed her eyes. She fell asleep filled with sadness, but without regret.

And anyway, the anticipation was always worse than the thing itself - the anticipation and the memory, of course. And the anticipation of the memory was maybe the worst part of all.

I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.

It had felt as if I were truly awake for the first time, true knowledge running like ice in my blood.The memory exhilirated me for a moment, then left me with a broken cord of loss.

In that moment I understood what they say about nostalgia, that no matter if you're thinking of something good or something bad, it always leaves you a little emptier afterward.

Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched; and her pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere photographs, but the world of an artist.