The way you wear your hat,
The way you sip your tea,
The mem’ry of all that—
No, no! They can’t take that away from me!

These lines are from the song “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and music by George Gershwin. The song was written for the 1937 RKO film Shall We Dance, where it is introduced by Fred Astaire (with Ginger Rogers) in a scene that frames the lyric as a tender inventory of intimate, everyday details that survive beyond a relationship’s end. Coming late in George Gershwin’s life (he died in 1937), the song quickly became a standard, often performed as a bittersweet remembrance rather than a triumphant anthem.

The speaker lists small, idiosyncratic gestures—how someone wears a hat, sips tea—as emblems of a shared private world. The refrain insists that while circumstances, distance, or even death may remove the beloved, the “mem’ry of all that” remains inalienable. Gershwin’s lyric turns the mundane into the sacred: love is preserved not in grand declarations but in observed habits and quirks. The repeated “No, no!” functions as self-argument, as if the speaker must actively defend memory against loss, making the song a poised blend of affection, grief, and resilience.