Quotes About Recollection

“A civilization is integral and healthy to the extent [that] it is founded on the "invisible" or "underlying" religion, the religio perennis, that is, to the extent [that] its expressions or forms are transparent to the Non-Formal and tend toward the Origin, thus conveying the recollection of a lost Paradise, but also - and with all the more reason - the presentiment of a timeless Beatitude. For the Origin is at once within us and before us; time is but a spiral movement around a motionless Center.”

— Frithjof Schuon

“Threw you the obvious and you flew with it on your back,
A name in your recollection, down among a million same. - A Perfect Circle.”

— Maynard James Keenan

“I wondered whether you and Mr. Locke had any recollection about the past.
I see now that we all suffer the same.”

— Nathan Reese Maher

“Mere pleasure is at best but fleeting; happiness is abiding, for in the recollection thereof is renewed.”

— James E. Talmage

“Autunm eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.
In the mirror it's Sunday,
in dream there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.
My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we exchange dark words,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in the conches,
like the sea in the moon's blood ray.
We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from
the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.
It is time it were time.
It is time.”

— Paul Celan

“People are often asking me if the things in my short stories really happened to me. I always think this is the same question to ask of a life - did this really happen to me? The body doesn't lie. But when we bring language to the body, isn't it always already an act of fiction? With its delightfully designed composition and color saturations and graphic patterns? Its style and vantage point? Its insistence on the mind's powerful force of recollection in the face of the raw and brutal fact that the only witness was the body?”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

“Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.”

— Edna O'Brien

“Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.”

— Jack Kerouac

“Miss Edith Clay brightened the room with her presence. Just from walking through the door, she'd made the room a happier place. This was true despite his having spent the last several months assuring himself his recollection of her had to be incorrect. His recollection was not incorrect. It was appallingly accurate.”

— Carolyn Jewel

“Through the lavender gloom clouding the entrance of the operations tent, Yossarian glimpsed Chief White Halfoat, diligently embezzling whiskey rations, forging the signatures of nondrinkers and pouring off the alcohol with which he was poisoning himself into separate bottles rapidly in order to steal as much as he could before Captain Black roused himself with recollection and came hurrying over indolently to steal the rest himself.”

— Joseph Heller

“So the life of the philosopher extends widely: he is not confined by the same boundary as are others. He alone is free from the laws that limit the human race, and all ages serve him as though he were a god. Some time has passed: he grasps it in his recollection. Time is present: he uses it. Time is to come: he anticipates it. This combination of all times into one gives him a long life.”

— Seneca

“Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else.”

— John Philip Sousa

“On the recollection of so many and great favours and blessings, I now, with a high sense of gratitude, presume to offer up my sincere thanks to the Almighty, the Creator and Preserver.”

— William Bartram

“I know people who have a much better recollection of their childhood than I do. They remember very well when they were a year and a half and two years old. I've only one or two daguerreotypes that come to mind.”

— Orson Welles

“My recollection of the higher school certificate, which involved a practical exam in physics, was being confronted with an experiment involving a sort of barometer arrangement, wondering why I couldn't make it work.”

— Peter Higgs

“Shirley's gonna be pissed," Gazarra said. "She hates when I get shot." To my recollection, the only other time Gazarra was shot was when he was playing quick draw in the police station elevator and his gun accidentally discharged. The bullet ricocheted off the elevator wall and lodged in Gazarra's right buttock.”

— Janet Evanovich

“My friend Quincy Jones says we won our first Grammys together in 1963. I have no recollection. I don't even remember the room. When he showed me the picture, I remembered what I wore. But it's like awards don't mean anything.”

— Barbra Streisand

“The bare recollection of anger kindles anger.”

— Publilius Syrus

“My recollection is - and I'd have to confirm this - but I don't recall paying any money to go to law school.”

— Joe Biden

“But I didn't say he was married. I said he was engaged to be married. There is a great difference. I have a distinct remembrance of being married, but I have no recollection at all of being engaged. I am inclined to think that I never was engaged.”

— Oscar Wilde

“He wouldn't spend another standing in the darkness, hot and sick and shaking inside with a confused mess of feelings that weren't worth analyzing. That he shouldn't have felt anyway.
With Rachel gone it was like balancing on the edge of a cliff-and all the little wildflowers, the netting of grass and roots that kept the cliff from sliding into the sea below, were gone. It was just Matt standing there looking down, waiting to fall.
Even Rachel's memory, the sweet recollection of all they had built, all they had shared, was no longer strong enough to fight gravity. From the moment he had looked across the wet grass and seen Nathan Doyle standing in the shadow of a stone saber-toothed tiger, something had changed inside him. Something battened down had torn free, like a sail taking its first deep breath of sea air.
It terrified him.
And at the same time it exhilarated him.
Which terrified him all the more.”

— Josh Lanyon

“We do not look for reason for logic in the passionate entreaties of those who are sick unto death; we are stung with the recollection of a thousand slighted opportunities of fulfilling the wishes of those who will soon pass away from among us: and do they ask us for the future happiness of our lives, we lay it at their feet, and will it away from us.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

“The harvest of old age is the recollection and abundance of blessing previously secured.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

“I have no recollection of writing the play of Peter Pan, now being published for the first time so long after he made his bow upon the stage.”

— J.M. Barrie

“If you had been there you would not have noticed. You would not have noticed your own stillness in this thin slice of time. But, if you had been there and you had, in some unfathomable way, recorded the stillness, taken a negative of it as the glass plate receives the light, to be developed later, you would have known, when the thought, the recollection was finally developed, that this was the moment it began. The clock ticked. The hour struck. Everything moved again. The train was late.”

— Robert Goolrick

“Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) the European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be a monumental slab. It's about that slab, and how it's been shaped, or what's been carved on it. In "termite art" though, your slab has been wormholed countless times, and its meaning is really taking place in the resulting interstices. The actual art of the piece, in other words, and your enjoyment of it, is taking place in the cracks, and the shape of the slab is coincidental and ultimately meaningless.”

— William Gibson

“Did we kiss last night?"
"Yes."
"Well, it wasn't memorable because I have no recollection of it."
He laughs. "I was kiddin'. We didn't kiss." He leans in. "When we kiss you'll remember it.Forever.”

— Simone Elkeles

“There is no recollection which time does not put an end to, and no pain which death does not remove.”

— Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

“The recollection of one upward hour
Hath more in it to tranquilize and cheer
The darkness of despondency, than years
Of gayety and pleasure.”

— James Gates Percival

“So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.”

— Sue Grafton

“There are some places which, seen for the first time, yet seem to strike a chord of recollection. "I have been here before," we think to ourselves, "and this is one of my true homes." It is no mystery for those philosophers who hold that all which we shall see, with all which we have seen and are seeing, exists already in an eternal now; that all those places are home to us which in the pattern of our life are twisting, in past, present and future, tendrils of remembrance round our heart-strings.”

— E. C. Bentley

“In betting on races, there are two elements that are never lacking - hope as hope, and an incomplete recollection of the past.”

— E. V. Lucas

“To the best of my recollection, I became a philosopher because my parents wanted me to become a lawyer. It seems to me, in retrospect, that there was much to be said for their suggestion. On the other hand, many philosophers are quite good company; the arguments they use are generally better than the ones that lawyers use; and we do get to go to as many faculty meetings as we like at no extra charge.”

— Jerry Fodor

“Mr. Buckles has a vivid recollection of historic times, and one way for me to honor the service of those who wear the uniform in the past and those who wear it today is to herald you, sir, and to thank you very much for your patriotism and your love for America.”

— Frank Buckles

“Those who have lived in a house with spoiled children must have a lively recollection of the degree of torment they can inflict upon all who are within sight or hearing.”

— Maria Edgeworth

“Fishing seems to be divided, like sex, into three unequal parts: anticipation and recollection and, in between, actual performance.”

— Arnold Gingrich

“The heart is always young only in the recollection of those whom it has loved in youth.”

— Arsene Houssaye

“Although my parents were kind and loving, I had none of the joys, or the companionship, which small children usually have. From my earliest years my recollection is of my father saying: 'Do no' or 'Thou shall not'. Any form of sport or light entertainment was frowned upon and regarded as not edifying. There was only condemnation and prohibition ...”

— John George Haigh

“Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about. What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead they don't read books. This I find unbearable.”

— William Maxwell

“Let us remember the loving-kindness of the Lord and rehearse His deeds of grace. Let us open the volume of recollection, which is so richly illuminated with memories of His mercy, and we will soon be happy.”

— Alistair Begg

“The soul then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all ... all enquiry and all learning is but recollection.”

— Socrates

“Prayer is the peace of our spirit, the stillness of our thoughts, the evenness of recollection, the seat of meditation, the rest of our cares and the calm of our tempest; prayer is the issue of a quiet mind, of untroubled thoughts, it is the daughter of charity, and the sister of meekness.”

— Jeremy Taylor

“There is anguish in the recollection that we have not adequately appreciated the affection of those whom we have loved and lost.”

— Benjamin Disraeli

“The next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.”

— Benjamin Franklin

“I want to produce images that startle one into recollection.”

— John Baldessari

“Perhaps the most vivid recollection of my youth is that of the local wheelmen, led by my father, stopping at our home to eat pone, sip mint juleps, and flog the field hands. This more than anything cultivated my life-long aversion to bicycles.”

— Tennessee Williams

“We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.”

— Oliver Sacks

“Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.”

— Theodor Adorno

“People don't know the value of what they have until it is gone: Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered ... Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude. Don't wait till freedom is gone before you enjoy, value, support, protect and make the most of it!”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero