Quotes About Memory

Death is a problem of the living. Dead people have no problems.

De um modo geral, as vítimas da história, os grupos menos poderosos que foram derrotados, têm tido apenas uma pequena oportunidade de serem recordados. O principal quadro de referência do que é recordado como história continua sendo até hoje um Estado, e os livros de história ainda são, sobretudo, crônicas de Estados.

time was just a hangover from the past with no present meaning

Dear Jesse, as the moon lingers a moment over the bitterroots, before its descent into the invisible, my mind is filled with song. I find I am humming softly; not to the music, but something else; some place else; a place remembered; a field of grass where no one seemed to have been; except a deer; and the memory is strengthened by the feeling of you, dancing in my awkward arms.

If you push me far enough, all I really know is that he was a fine fisherman. You know more than that, my father said. He was beautiful.

I am haunted by waters.

Then he asked, "After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? "Only then will you understand what happened and why. "It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us." Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality

I remember saying things, but I have no idea what was said. It was generally a friendly conversation." —Associated Press reporter Jack Sullivan, attempting to recount a 3 A.M. exchange we had at a dinner party and inadvertently describing the past ten years of my life.

It has always been my belief that people are remembered for the sum of their accomplishments but defined by their singular failure.

History is a creative process (or as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "a set of lies agreed upon"). The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

It's peculiar what you remember when you're not trying.

So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix : In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning.

One of the minor tragedies of human memory is our inability to unwatch movies we'd love to see (again) for the first time.

The nineties were a golden age for metropolitan newspapers and glossy magazines, yet most copies were destroyed or recycled within a month and never converted to digital files. It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.

the Mandela Effect is a collective delusion in which large swaths of the populace misremember a catalog of indiscriminate memories in the same way.

Now, obviously, all old people seem cool whenever we see black-and-white images of their younger selves. It's human nature to inject every old picture with positive abstractions. We can't help ourselves. We all do it. We want those things to be true, because we all hope future generations will have the same thoughts when they come across forgotten photographs of us.

Most live video footage was not permanently saved, often taped over to reduce costs (some of the only material that remains from this period was recorded by one private citizen—Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia woman who compulsively recorded and stored over 40,000 VHS tapes of news broadcasts between the years of 1979 and 2012, eventually donating the collection to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive).

The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

There's a communal memory of Cobain's wearing flannel in this video, and that this image was the dawn of grunge fashion. This, however, is another case of the Mandela Effect—he's just wearing a brown shirt with green stripes.

I rarely remember the names or faces of nonfictional people.

It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names.

Literary posterity may

We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.