Quotes About Memory

We don't shoot somebody soon, I'm gonna forget how

You sit at a desk twelve hours a day and you have nothing to show for it except some numbers that won't exist or be remembered in a week. You're leaving no evidence you lived. There's no proof.

Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know- they'd trade it all to know they've been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.

Why do we pursue information that we know will never leave our heads?

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway.

When I was very young I couldn't watch anything black and white on TV because I knew the people moving were now dust.

Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in east-central Colombia, with forty-two locals we hadn't yet met. It was a clear and eyeblue day, that day, as was the first day of this story, a few years ago in January, on Chicago's North Side, in the opulent shadow of Wrigley and with the wind coming low and searching off the jagged half-frozen lake.

Always we learn things and then we forget them.

How old are you?" the woman asked. "You look about eleven." "Twenty-four," Mae said. "My god. You don't have a mark on you. Were we ever twenty-four, my love?" She turned to the man, who was using a ballpoint pen to scratch the arch of his foot. He shrugged, and the woman let the matter drop.

Now create in your mind the best of days, and memorize these details, place this day center in your mind, and when you are the most frightened, bring forth this day and place yourself within it.

Your memory has always been given to opportunistic revision.

I want to be seen. I want proof I existed.

We lose weeks like buttons, like pencils." ? A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Memory, perhaps, should have no physical shape.

write the past in disappearing ink

A few years ago" has a comfortable distance. The blood is dry, the scabs hardened, peeled. Early on was different.

and wind whispered in the porch. Didn't I tell my father I would kill him? And should I? I searched the house. I heard a noise and went into

It is said that you are a New Yorker the moment you remember the way New York used to be. This miraculous place lives to obliterate its history. It is history as fashion. Trend. Moments. Moments lost and... overwritten. You have to hunt the past in NY. Not like Prague. Budapest. Krakow. Paris. Istanbul. These places wear their pasts with honor over their hearts. A woman. Not a girl. New York... is youth. Always trying on new masks, new faces.

Your Brain is for having ideas not storing them.

Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored only in your mind, you've generated personal failure, because you can't do them both at the same time. This produces a pervasive stress factor whose source can't be pinpointed.

The Zeigarnik Effect, as it has come to be known today, states simply that the brain naturally remembers and holds on to anything that is interrupted or incomplete. These interruptions and incompletions are called open loops.

It happened so long ago I can't even be sure it happened as I say it did. Stories change in the telling, memory makes up as much as it knows. We were very small. The things we saw were all mixed up with the things we dreamed and the things we were scared of.

Mum has made a little model of Dad - it looks nothing like him, of course, at least not when I compare it with his photographs, but somehow it seems to be more like him than the photographs do.

And I was there as well," he said. "And for one as old as me it's not so long ago, and it drove us all a little mad and a little sad and left us all with partly broken hearts.