Quotes About Memory

It was a trick no one expected of an American, the combination of a good ear, a good memory, and an understanding of the rules of grammar, so that I appeared more of a prodigy than I was.

Glimpses of how it really was before us are rare, if not impossible.

He has us draw a floor plan of the first place we ever remember living. 'The rooms, the closets, the hallway,' he says as he draws one himself on the blackboard. He turns back to us and says, 'Now add the significant details: the couch, the bourbon bottle, the slot between the wall and the fridge.' He laughs. 'You see? I've already told you my whole childhood in three details.' He jogs to the left and writes in block letters: NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS.

Conversations in foreign languages don't linger in my head like they do in English. They don't last.

Tomorrow after you leave I will stand here at this window and remember that yesterday you were right here with me.

We went from French to a sort of hybrid of the Catalan and Castilian that he taught me, and I wonder if that's part of the reason I don't miss him, that everything we ever said to each other was in languages I'm starting to forget.

I told him the things that were coming back to me about my mother when I was little: her lemon smell

Polky Polky I used to call it." "Dot Dot, actually." Hanne smiled. "Dot Dot. I thought you were the most beautiful singer in the whole world." Oda felt pitched up onto the crest of a wave, like one of those boats far out at sea.

Everything we ever said to each other was in languages I'm starting to forget.

How does a man in Mississippi in the 1920s create a character who feels more alive to a waitress in 1997, remembered with more tenderness, than most of the boys she's ever known? How do you create a character like that?

He'd always been the same person. He marveled at how in books people looked back fondly to remembered selves as if they were lost acquaintances. But he'd never been anything but this one self.

I never encourage deceit, and falsehood, especially if you have got a bad memory, is the worst enemy a fellow can have. The fact is truth is your truest friend, no matter what the circumstances are.

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

All the strange, checkered past seems to crowd upon my mind.

Perhaps some day it will be pleasant to remember even this.

Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.' 

the beginning of David Copperfield, a novel by Charles Dickens. It may be fiction, but it raises issues crucial to the exploration of life writing and how it works. One of those issues concerns fact versus fiction, because how can anyone prove what they have only been told? Another is to do with the function of memory: incomplete memory doesn't prevent Copperfield from writing about himself.

Why remember? Because remembering honors. Remembering heals. Remembering forgives. Remembering creates appreciation and gratitude — two of the most wondrous salves for your sorrows.

Leaving Inishmore' by Michael Longley, from Selected Poems (1998, p.22). What

His uncaring mother did not alert him to the intrinsic nature of maternal love. It was keen as it was strong, and it's memory razor sharp.

Mr. Schock smiled at Peter and raised his hand into the air. Peter instinctively struck it in a perfect high five. Mr. Schock's smile transformed into a puzzeled frown. "Joshua, how did you...?" "Peter used to do it," said Peter swiftly.

I couldn't dream of a future, I couldn't reliably remember my past.

Trying to compose even a single sentence can have the same effect, as we try to juggle grammatical and syntactical alternatives plus all the possibilities of tone, nuance, and rhythm even a simple sentence offers. Composing, then, is a cognitive activity that constantly threatens to overload short-term memory.

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography. You could wear, once more, your own life in all its stages, from whatever they wrapped you in when you emerged from the dark red naked warmth of the womb to your deathbed.