Quotes About Memory

Don't you let them forget about you," she said. But this was not about being forgotten. This was about being in a file cabinet with my name on it and they closed the door. I was a corpse with a tag on my toe.

this was not about being forgotten. This was about being in a file cabinet with my name on it and they closed the door. I was a corpse with a tag on my toe. A

I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of water, the chink of dogs' leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother's dip-pen, the smell of the tree, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I

You talk to the night I was her first, you say. And you'll say You knew me once When my dress was made of autumn leaves And my hair a smoldering fire As you smoke your cigar Sip whisky with its peaty smoke. Memory fades, but never that. A kiss among furs, Another kind of fire.

But she was sure old Henry'd showed up with the other granola-heads, lit incense and rang finger cymbals and blew some pot, no doubt, in John's memory. Om rama rama. Did John Lennon really want all that? Was that what he was about? From what she'd heard, the guy'd had some wit and brains - did he really want to be the dead guy of the hour, like a melting centerpiece?

Most of what happens to us goes unremembered. The events of our life are like photographic negatives. The few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories.

Most of what happens to us goes unremembered. The events of our lives are like photographic negatives. The few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories.

The old are still accorded human rights. The dead, however, lose all rights from the very first second of death. No law protects them any longer from slander, their privacy has ceased to be private; not even the letters written to them by their loved ones, not even the family album left to them by their mothers, nothing, nothing belongs to them any longer.

Don't be fooled. Charlie remembers things exactly the way he wants to remember them. I suppose we all do...And then we spend the rest of our lives basing the way we think about our families on what we THOUGHT happened--instead of what really did.

What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I learned, is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Many competitive mnemonists argue that their skills are less a feat of memory than of creativity.

Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens.

Washington, D.C., is not a subtle city. Unlike the capitals of other once-great powers which, many hundreds of years old, present a more seamless meshing of monumental memory and daily life, D.C. is constructed to shout, 'Here I am! I am powerful!' to the world.

It took them only an instant to cut of that head, but it is unlikely that a hundred years will suffice to reproduce a singular one.

Instead of receding, the past actually becomes more important. That's what will happen to you. It sounds unlikely, but the past actually changes complexion as you get older.

Every one and every single time is different, and I didn't have C-sections, which I don't know if that's lucky or unlucky, but I was able to feel every contraction. You forget what it feels like. God's got a great way of making women forget what it's like because we would never go through it again.

All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.

Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.

After the fighting is done, and even when it's still happening, apologies are often needed for the recounting of bare facts. Sometimes bare facts feel unpatriotic.

The hardest thing is to tell the truth about oneself. One doesn't like to remember unpleasant details, but forgetting them makes one's life seem disorganized.

The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.

We recognise that, with time, every human being will cease being, will only have been. And so we seek to resist time. We rebel against it. We are drawn like lovers to the unreachable past, to imagined memories, to nostalgia.

Whenever we're having a great time, we're already anticipating the day when we will remember this great time. Many of us live in that unreal area between the past, the present, and the future.

The future is, of course, imaginary - an unreal place that I create from my expectations, which are made from my remembered experiences, especially repeated experiences.

I remember 'The Cosby Show,' but that was something completely different. Comedy. There was a lightness to it and a sort of unrealistic perfection.