Quotes About Memory

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Part of it has to do with this business of being approached in public. I have a distinctive look - it's partly the glasses I wear - and people seem to remember me once they've seen me.

The Holocaust industry has always been bankrupt. What remains is to openly declare it so. The time is long past to put it out of business.

Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.

In addition to unfinished business, some ghosts haunt so that they will be remembered.

I compare it to being in a car accident. There's so much adrenaline rushing through you that you remember being in the accident but you don't remember any of the details.

I remember things that happened sixty years ago, but if you ask me where I left my car keys five minutes ago, that's sometimes a problem.

I went to watch my father at Silverstone in the early 1950s, and I've still got the car he was in.

...after a certain quantity, photos apparently taken by chance, postcards chosen according to a passing mood, begin to trace an itinerary, to map the imaginary country that stretches out before us.

Every time your stream of thoughts solidifies into a heavy story line that seems to be taking you elsewhere, label that "thinking." Then you will be able to see how all the passion that's connected with these thoughts, or all the aggression or all the heartbreak, is simply passing memory. If even for a second you actually had a full experience that it was all just thought, that would be a moment of full awakening.

A stone has been cast into the reliable immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside everything appears different. The reflections are quite other; everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery

Far as I'm concerned, they're all still here, like a lot of dear little ghosts.

When I look at those years I look at them alone. What happened there happens now only inside my head - no one else sees the same landscape, hears the same sounds, knows the sequence of events. There is another voice, but it is one that only I hear. Mine - ours - is the only evidence.

You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.

His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally- as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls....

Don't think about it. However it was it is over now. However it was or whereever it was. He is not lying there any more. He is nowhere now. Nowhere at all. Don't think about it.

To be completely ignorant of the collective past seems to me to be another state of amnesia; you would be untethered, adrift in time. Which is why all societies have sought some kind of memory bank, whether by way of folklore, story-telling, recitation of the ancestors--from Homer to Genesis. And why the heritage industry does so well today; most people may not be particularly interested in the narrative of the past, in the detail or the discussion, but they are glad to know that it is there.

I have learned to be suspicious of memory--my own, anyone's--but to accord it considerable respect. Whether accurate or not, it can subvert a life.

We are all of us palimpsests; we carry the past around, it comes surging up whether or not we want it, it is an albatross, and a crutch.

Fiction can seem more enduring than reality. Pierre on the field of battle, the Bennet girls at their sewing, Tess on the threshing machine – all these are nailed down for ever, on the page and in a million heads. What happened to me on Charmouth beach in 1920, on the other hand, is thistledown.

History is not so much memory as collective evidence. It is what has happened, what is thought to have happened, what some claim to have happened. The collective past is fact and fabrication--much like our private pasts. There is no received truth, just a tenuous thread of events amid a swirl of dispute and conflicting interpretation. But... the past is real. This is simplistic, but also, for me, awe-inspiring. I am silenced when I think about it: the great ballast of human existence.

One thing old age does is play tricks with time. Time

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule. I

He sees that time is what we live in, but that it is also what we carry within us. Time is then, but it is also our own perpetual now.