Quotes About Memory

I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour drinking milk shakes cold and long Smiling and waving and looking so fine don't think you knew you were in this song. - Five Years

Today you meet more folks than your ancestors could imagine Ã¢â'¬Â¦ some in passing. Some for a crucial instant. Others for tangled decades. Biology can't keep up. Our overworked temporal lobes cannot "know" the face-name-reps of ten billion people!

As simple an act as reading or writing a sentence must be surrounded by perceptory nap and weave . . . an itch, a stray memory from childhood, the distant sound of a barking dog, or something left over from the lunch that is found caught between the teeth.

At last, a kind of immortality could be achieved by anybody who learned the new trick of recording their words and thoughts and stories, by marking impressions in wet clay. The immortality of speaking across time and space, even long after your original body returned to dust.

d'un homme qui a perdu tout ce qu'il aimait et qui, depuis, n'est plus tout à fait de ce monde.

It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.

I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants-silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.

In the Ebbinghaus curve, or forgetting curve, R stands for memory retention, s is the relative strength of memory and t is time. The power of a memory can be built through repetition, but it is the memory we are recalling when we speak, not the event. And stories are annealed in the telling, edited by turns each time they are recalled...People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived.

Every love story is a ghost story.

I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that's odd, isn't it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?

That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example 'where they were' when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored.

the only real significance she had attached to the memory was that it was funny what stuck with you.

I wonder if anyone feels as though they're the same person they seem to remember. It would make them have a nervous breakdown. It probably wouldn't even make sense. I don't know if this is enough. I don't know what anybody else has told you.

and David Wallace blinks in the midst of idly scanning class photos from his 1980 Aurora West H.S. yearbook and seeing my photo and trying, through the tiny little keyhole of himself, to imagine what all must have happened to lead up to my death in the fiery single-car accident he'd read about in 1991...

A like N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker is that every professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody's general description, a Biker.

this was why mothers were so obsessively, consumingly, drivenly, and yet somehow narcissistically loving of you, their kid: the mothers are trying frantically to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember.

Between a cold kitchen window gone opaque with the stove's wet heat and the breath of us, an open drawer, and the gilt ferrotype of identical boys flanking a blind vested father which hung in a square recession above the wireless's stand, my Mum stood and cut off my long hair in the uneven heat.

To try and forget, rasa the tabula, wipe the memory totally out, numb it with opiates.

She smelled of talcum powder and Big Red.

Something happens to a novel as it ages, but what? It doesn't ripen or deepen in the manner of cheese and wine, and it doesn't fall apart, at least not figuratively. Fiction has no half-life. We age alongside the novels we've read, and only one of us is actively deteriorating. Which is to say that a novel is perishable only by virtue of being stored in such a leaky cask: our heads.

started to see that maybe he had forgotten the whole incident.

A legbensÅ'ségesebb emlékem ?kelmérÅ'l az állkapcsa szúróssága és a nyakszaga, amikor vacsoránál elnyomott az álom, és fölvitt lefeküdni. Vékony nyaka volt, de jó meleg szaggal [...]

It occurs to me that neither my aunt nor my uncle has once asked what happened to the pretty little thing that came visiting with us last time we were up, and I wonder what my mother has said to my aunt. I begin to be anxious about something I can neither locate nor define.

Flesh decays; bone endures. Flesh forgets and forgives ancient injuries; bone heals, but it always remembers: a childhood fall, a barroom brawl; the smash of a pistol butt to the temple, the quick sting of a blade between the ribs. The bones capture such moments, preserve a record of them, and reveal them to anyone with eyes trained to see the rich visual record, to hear the faint whispers rising from the dead.