A meditation on the essence of memory and imagination, artist Edgar Degas wisely said: “It is all right to copy what you see, but it is much better to draw what you can no longer see except through your memory. This is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory. All you reproduce is what struck you.” 🎨

“One always begins to forget a place as soon as it’s left behind.” ~ Charles Dickens

“The true art of memory is the art of attention.” ~ Samuel Johnson

“Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.” ~ Steven Wright

“Every day your memory grows dimmer—it doesn’t haunt me like it did before.” ~ Bob Dylan

“You don’t have to hold onto the pain to hold onto the memory.” ~ Janet Jackson

“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

“We do not remember days, we remember moments.” ~ Cesare Pavese

“There’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year.” ~ William Shakespeare

“Memory depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want of memory, when the defect is in their judgment; and others, by grasping at all, retain nothing.” ~ Margaret Fuller

“Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.” ~ Corrie ten Boom

“Memories, all those little experiences, make up the fabric of our lives and on balance, I wouldn’t want to erase any of them, tempting though it may be.” ~ Ben Affleck

“The key to a long and happy life is, at times, a very short-term memory.” ~ Scott Hamilton

“Memories and magic can happen at any moment.” ~ Valerie Fraser Luesse

“I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.” ~ Vladimir Nabokov