Quotes About Memory

second, the memory cycle time, describes how frequently you can repeat a memory reference.

Entrando nell'appartamento, Fenoglio percepiì come una traccia nell'aria. Fu un attimo, un'impressione, quasi una cosa immaginata, un ricordo che non riesci a ricordare, un pensiero fastidioso e inafferrabile.

Pensai alla frase più precisa che abbia mia letto sul concetto di felicità. Era di Prévert - o forse di Proust? - e faceva più o meno così: "Ho riconosciuto la felicità dal rumore che ha fatto andandosene." Mi chiesi se anche questa fosse melensa, solo più adatta alla mia indole. Non risposi alla domanda. Non lo faccio quasi mai.

For who has not wondered whether everything in this world might be alive? Though it be made of stone or wood or metal, there might be life in it, or opinion or, worst of all, resentment. The hewn boards of any boardwalk, did they recall the bite of the saw? Does memory linger in them? Perhaps the forge's fire still dreams in each nail. A building might be made entirely of injured and brooding things.

How cruel that she had really seen him, touched him. That he had been real, not another phantasm drifting greyly among the trees, a little gasp of loneliness from her afflicted mind. But a beautiful face, and a voice not merely familiar but in her bones. The Ridgerunner was gone, and she could still smell him on her hands.

But everything is remembered by its moment of greatest intensity. Dying

But everything is remembered by its moment of greatest intensity. Dying was hers.

America want nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can, even if it turns out to be only last week. Not to face now or the future, but to face backwards.

to preserve the memory of that very first morning as, in its pristine state, unwrinkled by projection, one preserves the negative of a film.

Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree; Be the green grass above me With showers and dew drops wet; And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget. I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale

Sing on, as if in pain; And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, And haply may forget.

There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance.

Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.

Vous avez vécu dans le souvenir du bonheur, Karim. Rien n'empêche le bonheur comme le souvenir du bonheur

It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative values—the permanence of memory. —JOSEPH CONRAD

Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.

Poetry is a hook for memory

The dead are silenced and the living are speechless.Who's going to tell their stories if I don't?

The sea is a memory. It is mesmerising. Its beauty is intolerable. What it buries is vaster than what it reveals. Every so often you get a glimpse of what you forget, or you wade in and something snags you, a broken shell or a sea urchin the fishermen missed...No waves speak with the same voice, though they share the same elements and motion, the regular beating of the surf, their rippling heaves.

For her uncles, she realizes, it is as if ever since she left the country for New York City—for nothing! not to send money home but just to "galavant!"—ever since she left she has relinquished her right to her memory of home, and she should not be left to her devices or she will bumble through the nation like a witless tourist who cannot speak its languages, though in fact she code-switches in three of them, puns in five, makes money in two, and dreams in one.

Some days after, the girl encountered her again, in a dream, as she was years ago: a very slender young woman in a long white skirt, her amber hair to her waist, her eyes coal black with ardor.

When somebody dies thinking you are someone you haven't been in years—someone you maybe never were to begin with—what parts of your identity, real and constructed, do the dead take with them?

But the flu was expunged from newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and society's collective memory. Crosby calls the 1918 flu "America's forgotten pandemic," noting:

Antiguo oficio humano, este de querer apagar la luz. ¿Te acordás de la última vez que creímos poder iluminar la noche?.