Quotes About Memory

HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER

To lose all this forever is the essence of being human, my love.

If I should die," said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.

From what Paul tells me," said the Monsignor, "the Consul was true to his convictions, faithful to the memory of his grandmother Siri.

We have our non-organic memory to fall back on when our neural memories seem doubtful. Human beings have only that confusing mass of chemically driven neurological storage to rely on. They're all subjective and emotion-tinged. How can they trust any of their memories?

Sometimes I think that remembering too much history is like alcohol or heroin—an addiction that seems to give meaning to your life but just wears you down and destroys you in the end.

We all want to leave monuments

Richard, said Dave, do you ever wonder how much of your life you've spent trying to please the dead?

I think we underestimate how much of our own lives we devote to trying to meet the expectations of the dead, continued Dave. We don't even think about it, we just do.

Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

Bessel van der Kolk: "The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.

And these years later, when I think of that essay, what I remember most is not the moment I saw my work in New Yorker font, not when I saw the illustration of my father, not the congratulatory phone calls and notes that followed, but that predawn morning in my bedroom, at my desk, the lights of cars below on Broadway, my computer screen glowing in the dark.

What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest day; / Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn.

If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.

Our shared vocabulary—our own language—will die with us. We are the treasure itself: fathoms deep, in the world we have made and made again.

What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are?

There must be that second, bobbing and darting in the aliveness of their shared history, unmistakable, glowing like a firefly in the darkness. If only they could pinpoint it and stop it there, right there, at the small but indelible spot that somehow they missed the first time around, if only, then perhaps their whole family could begin again.

only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.

There is no permanent forgetting. Though the world of things is persuasive and distracting, the stories always come back, circled in neon. They are all the more alive for having been hidden.

think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be," wrote Joan Didion in her essay "On Keeping a Notebook," "whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, and who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

Sometimes people suggested that I must have an amazing memory—that surely I must recall so many scenes, moments, sensory details from my early years. But the truth is that I have a terrible memory. I struggled to access any of my childhood or even my teenage years. I had no recollection of it as a story. And so I followed my own line of words to see where it would lead me.

Would it always matter? Lines from a Delmore Schwartz poem come to mind: "What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest

He's been reading James Gleick, and repeats a passage to Ben by heart. "If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.

What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?