Quotes About Memory

un historiador serio y, como tal, un enemigo jurado de la industria de la memoria

Y el pasado volvió, inevitablemente.

Para escribir novelas no hace falta imaginación—dijo Bolaño—. Sólo memoria. Las novelas se escriben combinando recuerdos.

Nadie. Nadie se acuerda siquiera de por qué murieron, de por qué no tuvieron mujer e hijos y una habitación con sol; nadie, y, menos que nadie, la gente por la que pelearon.

Pero cuando Miralles muera —pensé—, sus amigos también morirán del todo, porque no habría nadie que se acuerde de ellos para que no mueran.

quizá porque en aquel momento tuve por primera vez la intuición falaz de que el pasado no es un lugar estable sino cambiante, permanentemente alterado por el futuro, y de que por tanto nada de lo ya acontecido es irreversible

I had stayed still and let the days pass, which is the best way to allow things in the real world to dissolve or break down, although they remain forever in our thoughts and in our knowledge, solid and putrid and stinking to high heaven. But that is bearable and we can live with it. Who doesn't carry something of that nature around with them?

We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.

One of the best possible perspectives from which to tell a story is that of a ghost, someone who is dead but can still witness.

People's memories improve 68 percent when they have a visual element to recall.

You have a bad memory for details. You can tell her the date of the Spanish Armada, but you couldn't even guess at the balance of your checkbook.

Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.

Bir katliami unutmak da katliam turunden bir seydir.

From the holocaust to the hologram: a fine programme.

We are threatened not just by memory loss, but by the routing of the synapses by the filterable viruses of memory. The strange disappearance of names, faces and places seems like a programmed erasure, like the imperceptible advance of a virus which, after infecting the artificial memories of computers, is now attacking natural memories. Might there not be a conspiracy of software?

Dart a very fine reed into the victim's heart. He will be left with a lethal stupefaction, but will not die of it. Dart a very fine glance into the eye of the torturer. He will be left with eternal remorse, without even remembering it.

Memory is a dangerous function. It retrospectively gives meaning to that which did not have any. It retrospectively cancels out the internal illusoriness of events, which was their originality. But if events retained their original, enigmatic form, their ambiguous, terrifying form, there would doubtless no longer be any history.

Foresight being the memory of the future, when everything is seeable nothing is any longer foreseeable.

Keep objects as a system Keep production as a mirror Keep death as an exchange Keep the world as a simulacrum Keep the evil transparent Keep the majorities silent Keep your seduction alive Keep your memory cool Keep yourself as an other Keep perfection as a crime Keep illusion for the end Keep on line for the while

It is not clear that, in their absolute sincerity, the testimonies themselves and the films do not contribute to this impossible memory. The real extermination is doomed to this other extermination which is that effected by the virtual. This is the true final solution.

Ronald Reagan , struck down by Alzheimer's disease, has simply forgotten he was once President of the United States. Is this really so serious? When he was President he had already forgotten he had been an actor. And isn't it more serious to take yourself for the President of the United States when you are, than to forget you have been when you no longer are?

When the real no longer is what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.

It is almost normal to lead a double life when you are alone. It is much more difficult when there are two of you. At last, a genuine madman in the street - someone who doesn't need a mobile phone to talk to himself. Some encounters stay in the memory thanks to the tone of voice, which you remember on an infra-red scale, so to speak, without being able to pin-point it.