Quotes About Memory

liars need to have good memories

his memory flooded with pain for all the hurts and wrongs that had been done in the name of God. As always, he would pray for forgiveness and the redemption of that pain.

Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all while years melted down into the fraction of a second.

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystallize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days.

When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.

The root of oppression is the loss of memory.

No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren't.

I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father's ghostly paths and we are entering same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain. As if we were images in a time-lapse photograph.

childhood memories are prisms, not panes of glass. Details may loom large in the eyes of our smaller selves, while important events lie beyond our vision or understanding.

As King ended his speech, I heard Mahalia Jackson call out, "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" And he did begin the "I have a dream" litany from memory, with the crowd calling out to him after each image—Tell it! What would be most remembered had been least planned. I hoped Mrs. Greene heard a woman speak up—and make all the difference.

The only time I ever went hunting I remembered it as a grisly experience.

People long to go backward in their imagination as well as forward. We don't wish simply to exist forever in some future; we wish to have existed in some distant past.

The likeness of a man is quite independent; everywhere that it stands, it stands for itself, and we do not require it to mark the site of a particular grave. But I must acknowledge to you to having a strange feeling; even to likenesses I have a kind of disinclination. Whenever I see them they seem to be silently reproaching me. They point to something far away from us,—gone from us; and they remind me how difficult it is to pay right honor to the present.

he's gone, and all the answers in the world can't undrown him

Erinnerungen sind aus wundersamen Stoff gemacht – trügerisch und dennoch zwingend, mächtig und schattenhaft. Es ist kein Verlaß auf die Erinnerung, und dennoch gibt es keine Wirklichkeit außer der, die wir im Gedächtnis tragen.

Der Schlaf, den wir ersehnen, der vollkommene Schlaf, ist traumlos. Wir werden von Träumen heimgesucht, sobald wir gelernt haben, uns zu erinnern und Reue zu empfinden

I didn't understand her being gone, either. I had seen her fall. Now her part of any conversation would always be unsaid, and the direction she would have gone walking would always be empty. Her absence extended in lines of numbers made of smoke, backward in memory and forward in futures never to occur.

There are so many ways to tell time-one way with clocks and watches and sunsets, or other ways with how many times a person laughs, or what they forget, or how they change their minds about what they care about, or why, or whom.

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. —JAMES JOYCE

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

Both the Beatles and The Rolling Stones broke on the music scene the summer I was in England. I can vividly remember hearing 'She Loves You' in August 1963.

Neuroenology explains how the fluid mechanics of the wine in your mouth and the patterns of your breathing activate your sensory and motor pathways to create the taste of wine and, together with your central brain systems for emotion and memory, generate the whole perception of wine pleasure. We

Forgiveness, I came to see, is about cleaning up the memory by renouncing and flushing vengeful feelings about other people.

I turned off my tape-recorder and just sat looking at him for a moment, this strange time-traveller from the year 1890 or so, who remembered when there were no cars, no electric lights, no airplanes, no state of Arizona.