Quotes About Memory

My definition of man is a cooking animal. The beasts have memory, judgement, and the faculties and passions of our minds in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook.

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

Men tend to remember the best things about the women they've loved and to forget the worst, which is why so many men make the same mistakes with women again and again. Women tend to forget the best things about the men they've loved and to remember the worst, which is why so many women become bitter about men.

Like Villa, I believed that even though some men did not deserve to go on living, they still deserved to be remembered at their best.

The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.

Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.

reminding himself to remember forever that the pen's a long arm from the grave.

his mind docketing the important things for future transcription.

Listen, this is my death poem: "Like dew I was born Like dew I vanish Osaka Castle and all that I have ever done Is but a dream Within a dream." A last smile, so tender, from the Despot to them and to him. "Guard my son, all of you." And then the eyes had opaqued forever.

why remember that nonsense? It weakens the mind.

What is past, one cannot change, so each backward glance is a bit of the present slipping away.

She would say that what is past, one cannot change, so each backward glance is a bit of the present slipping away.

They linger yet,      Avengers of their native land.—Gray

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down. It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses. It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.

In my mind my obituary is done.It is done and it is right. It tells the truth and as awful as it can be, the truth is what matters. It is what I should be remembered by, if I'm remembered at all. Remember the truth. that is all that matters

I, however, like black. It is a color that makes me comfortable and the color with which I have the most experience. In the darkest darkness, all is black. In the deepest hole, all is black. In the terror of my Addicted mind, all is black. In the empty periods of my lost memory, all is black. I like black, goddammit, and I am going to give it its due.

I go to my Room and I drink and I smoke some cigarettes and I think about her. I drink and I smoke and I think about her and at a certain point blackness comes and my memory fails me.

Its not just a smile of momentary happiness. When it disappears from my face, it will stay with me.

I want one last look at something beautiful. I want one last look so that I have something to hold in my mind while I'm dying, so that when I take my last breath I will be able to think of something that will make me smile, so that in the midst of the horror I can hold on to some shred of humanity.

There is one thing. One thing that haunts me from page one to page twenty-two. I have never spoken of it. I have never told another person

He's gone, but my memory isn't and it won't be for a long time. It has always been a fault of mine. I hold my memory.

The initial trauma of a young child may go underground but it will return to haunt us.

Your body moves always in the present, the dividing line between the past and the future, but your mind is more free. It can think and is in the present. It can remember and at once is in the past. It can imagine and at once is in the future, in its own choice of all the possible futures. Your mind can travel through time. (Eric Frank Russell, 1941)

In 1962 the president of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh , warned his colleagues that human existence was undergoing a "Great Mutation"—so sudden and so radical "that we are now suffering something like historical amnesia." He lamented the decline of reading; the distancing from nature (which he blamed in part on "ugly yellow Kodak boxes" and "the transistor radio everywhere"); and the loss of shared culture.