Extracts
On Memory
Selected from the Winter 2020 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
—Willa Cather, 1918
There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time in the midst of wretchedness.
—Dante Alighieri, c. 1321
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1886
One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.
—Phyllis Rose, 1991
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, chawing a hunk of melon in the dust.
—Elizabeth Bowen, 1955
Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe—though we didn’t know it at the time.
—Susan Sontag, 1973
Anything one is remembering is a repetition, but existing as a human being that is being, listening, and hearing is never repetition.
—Gertrude Stein, 1935
The true art of memory is the art of attention.
—Samuel Johnson, 1759
Memory is necessary for all operations of reasoning.
—Blaise Pascal, c. 1658
Memory is like the moon, which hath its new, its full, and its wane.
—Margaret Cavendish, 1655
Anyone who in discussion quotes authority uses his memory rather than his intellect.
—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500
Everyone complains about his memory, and no one complains about his judgment.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1666
There’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1600
Someone will remember us I say even in another time. —Sappho, c. 600 BC
A monument is money wasted. My memory will live on if my life has deserved it.
—Pliny the Younger, c. 109
To endeavor to forget anyone is a certain way of thinking of nothing else.
—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688
Memories are hunting horns whose noise dies away in the wind. —Guillaume Apollinaire, 1913
The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.
—Charles Babbage, 1837
What is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC
All ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them.
—Mark Twain, 1903
Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.
—Harriet Doerr, 1978
Time robs us of all, even of memory.
—Virgil, c. 40 BC
Memory, like a beauty that is always present to hear herself flattered, is flattered by everyone. But the absent and silent goddess, Forgetfulness, has no votaries and is never thought of; yet we owe her much.
—Thomas Paine, 1766
I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886
With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present; it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life; it is a still-quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
—George Eliot, c. 1832
Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium. —T.S. Eliot, 1911
We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things, and once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774
We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
—Marcel Proust, c. 1922
The fragrance of a violet restores us to the enjoyment of many springs.
—Louis-François Ramond, 1789
Memory is the only afterlife I can understand. —Lisel Mueller, 1996
I think heaven will not be as good as earth, unless it bring with it that sweet power to remember, which is the staple of heaven here.
—Emily Dickinson, 1879
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MEMORY
Winter 2020