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

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

—Bob Dylan

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

—Barbara Kingsolver

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

—Benjamin Franklin

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

—Elbert Hubbard

The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient — at others so bewildered and weak — and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control!

—Jane Austen

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

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

—anonymous

Back on its golden hinges / The gate of Memory swings, / And my heart goes into the garden / And walks with the olden things.

—Ella Wheeler Wilcox

It is the calling of great men, not so much to preach new truths, as to rescue from oblivion those old truths which it is our wisdom to remember and our weakness to forget.

—Sidney Smith