Quotes About Memory

What first occurs to us on remembering the dream/reading the text may be the most important thing.

It is said that those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. That's not quite correct. We all forget history. The key is whether we have a way to go back to rediscover what we forget. More directly, the key is whether an objective past can keep us honest.

We want to forget until we start to forget. from the poem Regret

De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.

You can go home again ... so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.

When you stand inside somebody's library, you get a powerful sense of who they are, and not just who they are now but who they've been. . . . It's a wonderful thing to have in a house. It's something I worry is endangered by the rise of the e-book. When you turn off an e-book, there's no map. All that's left behind is a chunk of gray plastic. ~ Lev Grossman

I was going to click my heels and go home, where life would be, as it is anywhere, a little bit dull Knasas, a little bit great and terrible Oz. I just wanted to stand here for a minute, first, and fix in my memory the life I wasn't choosing, the way Rajiv looked at me before I told him I was leaving, the cottonwood snow. Nathan watched me, an uncertain look on his perfectly, terribly familiar face. "Are you ready?" he said

Someone started taking notes, Steve said, 'You don't need to takes notes. If it's important, you'll remember it'.

You don't need to take notes. If it's important, you'll remember it.

Cats don't forget. Cats know when they are needed and loved. These two would be better medicine for Minnie than anything that came out of a pill bottle.

Memory is a great deceiver: it embroiders until naught is left but the glory and the pleasure.

Pleasure is the flower that fades, remembrance is the lasting perfume.

The problem with all of her mental notes was they somehow got erased the moment after she made them. She supposed she could start writing them down on actual paper, but she was afraid if anybody saw them, they'd think she was fighting early Alzheimer's.

Look, Chuck, I haven't always been a fat old man. I sowed my wild oats, but there were some girls, after they got what they wanted, who were ashamed of what they did and wanted to forget that they couldn't wait to get their hands on my plow. You know what I mean? They'd say some crazy things.

But who needs memories, Ian thought, when you can have Instagram likes?

Things happen in your life that leave an imprint. Injustice left the deepest imprint on mine.

As writers we intend to make a difference, to alter people's lives for the greater good. . .this is why we write, to have an impact on society, to put a personal stamp on history. . .Art and literature are the legacies we leave to succeeding generations. We'll be forgotten, but our books and essays, our stories and poems can survive us. . .

I have a lifetime of learning ahead of me. I apply many of the things I learned in school, but I've forgotten most. Random snippets of the rules come back to me, at times, but my mind will eventually eradicate them all, relearn them, and reinvent them.

I'm not like Thomas Wolfe. I can go home again.

part of her life wouldn't end with her death.

You have this scent" Hana said quietly, "I used to think it was your perfume. Joy, ne?" "I still wear that." "I know," Hana said, and Etsuko resisted the urge to sniff her own wrists. "It's not just the perfume, though, it's all the other creams and things that you wear, and it makes up this smell. I used to walk around department stores wondering what it was. The smell of mama." Book 3, p401

I think it is very important that films make people look at what they've forgotten.