Memory Loss Quotes

“Nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last.”
― Juan Rulfo

“Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.”
― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns

“There are edges around the black and every now and then a flash of color streaks out of the gray. But I can never really grasp any of the slivers of memories that emerge.”
― Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits

“She would grab whatever she could - a look, a whisper, a moan - to salvage from perishing, to preserve. But time is most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all .”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Nostalgia has a way of blocking the reality of the past.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint's, it’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“I am starting to think that maybe memories are like this dessert. I eat it, and it becomes a part of me, whether I remember it later or not.”
― Erica Bauermeister, The School of Essential Ingredients

“It's all right if you can't remember. Our subconscious is spectacularly agile. Sometimes it knows when to take us away, as a kind of protection.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“It would be dreadfully
ironic, I mused, if once I earned a soul, I forgot everything about being fey, including all my memories of her. That sort of ending seemed
appropriately tragic; the smitten fey creature becomes human but forgets why he wanted to in the first place. Old fairy tales loved that sort of irony.”
― Julie Kagawa

“...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“Time it was
And what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence
A time of confidences

Long ago it must be
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They're all that's left you”
― Paul Simon, Lyrics 1964-2008

“I've been wondering," Isabelle commented reflectively over dessert, "if it is foolish to make new memories when you know you are going to lose them.”
― Erica Bauermeister, The School of Essential Ingredients

“Deep spirit scanning,” Eisfanger says. His voice has a strange resonance to it, like I’m hearing him through a bad phone connection. “Don’t worry, it’s completely safe. Well, mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“Side effects have been documented,” he admits. “In a very small percentage of cases. Less than two percent.”

“What kind of side effects?” Suddenly I’m feeling nauseous. Feels like the ants are crawling around inside me now, which is exactly as disturbing as it sounds.

“Memory loss. Synesthesia. And occasionally … vestigial growths.”

“So I could forget my own name, start smelling purple everywhere and have an extra nipple sprout from my forehead?”
― D.D. Barant, Back from the Undead

“You might be the scariest girl I've ever met," he told her.
"Let's not be dramatic," she said drily. "I'm the only girl you can remember ever meeting.”
― Sherry Thomas, The Perilous Sea

“Forgetting happens. If you stress about it, it'll happen even more.”
― Lisa Genova, Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting

“This old memory of me is here,
a more recent memory may
be somewhere else.
You'll find me where you need to.
The stems will help guide you.”
― Susan L. Marshall, Fleur of Yesterday

“Bunnu was no amateur when it came to escape. And even in his drowsiest moments, he understood implicitly that to forget his circumstances, even for a short while, meant first to forget himself. Who he was and why he was—to strip it all bare and start from scratch, as it were. In his nearly 250 years of life and, now, as an old emaciated man completely estranged from his family and closest friends—albeit more by circumstance than by choice—he understood the importance of this process and revered it, for there were far greater things to be done and achieved in the dark, uncertain areas of existence than in those circumscribed—and thereby strained—by comprehensibility.”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“You are my middle ground, canvas.
You may be blank, yet full of promise.
Maybe you can help me to see properly again.”
― Susan L. Marshall, Fleur of Yesterday

“The dress I seek cannot be found.
It is tucked away deeply inside
the constant flickering shadows
of my very absent mind.”
― Susan L. Marshall, Fleur of Yesterday

“You know, I always erase everything... And lately, my memory loss is erasing what time hasn't.”
― Rolf van der Wind

“I love you, baby. Every part of you. I love the way you link life into lyrics, how you smile at the moon and love like the ocean, far and wide, and without apology. I love how selfless you are, how honest and kind, even though life hasn't been so kind to you lately. I love how you try to be brave for your family because you don't want the to hurt, even when doing so hurts you a little. I love you so much I want to come home to you, wake beside you, and spend a lifetime worshiping you. I want the house you spoke of and the family in your dreams. I don't only want to be the man you need, but the one you want. The one you can't live without. I want to love you for a lifetime, and even more after that. But most of all, I just want the chance to make you mine again. Because I'm yours. Always. No matter what.”
― Meagan Brandy, Say You Swear

“I don't believe you, Jacks. I might not remember everything about you. But I know you. I know that I know you, and I don't believe there is anything you can't do.'

'I can't do this,' he said roughly.”
― Stephanie Garber, A Curse for True Love

“The Eviction by Stewart Stafford

The mind's paper vessel crumples
Sodden with learning and memory
Ne'er to sail waves of reminiscence
A living statue, hewn by sculptor Time.

The physician nor the shaman console
Self-pitying sobs in the moaning wind
Brought down by jackals in the dunes
The skull's tenant but a daily squatter

Nostalgic waves batter alien shores
Déjà vu of the blood and the collegial
A stranger's reflection in misting eyes
A sandcastle sacked to the four winds

© Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved”
― Stewart Stafford

“Grace knows the look on the woman's face. It's the way people look at her when her grip is failing, when she is slipping away. She knows that she has to hold on or she will lose her way, lose everything, but she can't be sure how to do it, how to hold on to herself and the people around her and the life that has made her.”
― Sean Wilson, You Must Remember This

“I hadn’t realized that Sinbad had gone and come back to my memory. The memory fail sneaks in and out without me knowing.”
― Jonathan Dunne, Hide the Elephant

“How do I find myself in nothingness?”
― Rita Kay, Tell Me It’s Fiction: Short Stories of Trauma, Healing, and Surreal Emotional Truths

“In his moments of lucidity, which would later become increasingly rare and painful, he suggested an explanation of what was happening to him: “I am a guilty man. That is why I am being punished like Abuya's heretical sons, I gazed when I should not have gazed and turned my eyes away when I should not have. I saw a sin committed… a crime…I could have, I should have, done something, called out, shouted, struck a blow. I forgot our precepts, our laws, that require an individual to struggle against evil wherever it appears. I forgot that we can never simply remain spectators, we have no right to stand aside, to keep silent, to let the victim fight the aggressor alone. I forgot so many things that day…That is why I am forgetting other things now. Can there be anything worse than that?”

Yes, there was worse, there is worse: to forget that one has forgotten.”
― Elie Wiesel, The Forgotten

“20 seconds of daydreaming can make you forget the whole previous 20 minutes, until you rewind. I’m speaking from experience. Amnesia”
― Niedria Dionne Kenny, Insane Asylum