MEMORY QUOTES III
quotations about memory
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Reflections
My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.
E. L. DOCTOROW
Homer & Langley
Ah, tell me not that memory
Sheds gladness o'er the past;
What is recalled by faded flowers,
Save that they did not last?
LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON
Ethel Churchill
Alzheimer's ... it is a barren disease, as empty and lifeless as a desert. It is a thief of hearts and souls and memories.
NICHOLAS SPARKS
The Notebook
Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.
ELIE WIESEL
Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1986
Scientists hypothesize that information is organized in the brain in associative networks. These neurological structures consist of nodes (concepts) that are linked to other nodes in complex networks of interconnectivity, each piece of information strongly or weakly connected to many other pieces of information. When we think or remember things, it activates whole patterns across the network. These networks are structured in order to best enable us to recall information efficiently to help us respond and act in different situations.
NICOLA BROWN
"Lest We Forget: How Memory Works and How to Apply It to Marketing Strategy", Skyword, November 30, 2017
I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.
EDWARD ALBEE
Three Tall Women
Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Heavenly Fire
How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?
DAN SIMMONS
Endymion
Memories are contrary things; if you quit chasing them and turn your back, they often return on their own.
STEPHEN KING
"Memory"
What if we're all like that? Like ghosts ... in someone's mind ... gradually fading ... fading ... until finally ... one day ... we just disappear ... drift into nothingness. Wouldn't that be sad?
WALTER WYKES
Fading Joy
Memory is merely the process of tuning into vibrations that have been left behind in space and time.
MICHIO KUSHI
Spiritual Journey
Continents of memory had been lost.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
The Diagnosis
Memory breeds in me strange loneliness.
WILLIAM HERBERT CARRUTH
Tescott
The nice thing about having a bad memory, you enjoy reruns.
ANONYMOUS
I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The World of Yesterday
No matter how long we exist, we have our memories. Points in time which time itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems.
ANNE RICE
Blood and Gold
Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn't mean that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not.
TOBIAS WOLFF
Continuum, summer 1998
A person who has not completely lost the memory of paradise, even though it is a faint one, will suffer endlessly. He will feel the call of the essential world, will hear the voice that comes from so far away that one cannot find out where it comes from, a voice that cannot guide him.
EUGENE IONESCO
Present Past / Past Present