We cannot afford to forget any experience, not even the most painful.  —Dag Hammarskjöld

Learning is about more than simply acquiring new knowledge and insights; it is also crucial to unlearn old knowledge that has outlive its relevance. Thus, forgetting is probably at least as important as learning.

—Gary Ryan Blair

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

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

A man’s real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.

—Alexander Smith Dreamthorp

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

—Barbara Kingsolver

It’s a pleasure to share one’s memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe — though we didn’t know it at the time. We know it now because it’s in the past, because we have survived.                —Susan Sontag

If you want to keep your memories, you first have to live them.              —Bob Dylan

How confusing the beams from memory’s lamp are; / One day a bachelor, the next a grampa. / What is the secret of the trick? / How did I get so old so quick? —Ogden Nash

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The charm, one might say the genius of memory, is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.          —Elizabeth Bowen

Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don’t have film.

—anonymous