Quotes About Memory

He remembered the faces of his friends, bereft poor corpses, abandoned of life.

As for what I'm doing now," he said, "I guess I'm trying to bring the past to life.

To negate the pain, men and gods forget, pretend to forget, then forget to pretend.

I liked the place I came from, but a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.

I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening; I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow. (Quoted by Josh Foer in Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything)

One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.

Of course, old man, I only saw the kid once, and then only for a moment, but - but it was an ugly sort of kid, wasn't it, if I remember rightly?' 'As ugly as that? ' I looked again, and honesty compelled me to be frank. 'I don't see how it could have been, old chap.

As a young child in Rome, he wrote out the entire score of a nine-voice religious work after hearing it twice.

But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away. That one touch of her hand.

Future and past blurred; what he had already experienced and what he would eventually experience blended so that nothing remained but the moment.

I have seen myself backward.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular lifestyle the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.

Human has always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there's nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment - the present - has little meaning, if any.

Every junkie, he thought, is a recording.

It's impossible that James Joyce could have mentioned talk-tapes in his writing, Asher thought. Someday I'm going to get my article published; I'm going to prove that Finnegan's Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn't exist until a century after James Joyce's era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I'll be famous forever.

There is no Pris," he said. "Only Rachael Rosen, over and over again.

Am I being paid back for something I did? he asked himself. Something I don't know about or remember? But nobody pays back, he reflected. I learned that a long time ago: you're not paid back for the bad you do nor the good you do. It all comes out uneven at the end. Haven't I learned that by now, if I've learned anything?

Tears began to surge up into her eyes, and she found herself doubling up her fists, with the thumbs inside, as she had done as a child; she felt her jaw wobble, and when she spoke her voice could hardly be heard.

She took his hand, squeezed it, held it, and then, all at once, she let it drop. But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away.

he could remember the prewar days, the other times. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the World's Fair; the former better world.

Eventually he forgot what event had started off his decline into entropy; God mercifully occludes us to the past as well as the future.

to have watched a human being you loved deeply, that you had gotten real close to, held and slept with and kissed and worried about and befriended and most of all admired—to see that warm living person burn out from the inside, burn from the heart outward. Until it clicked and clacked like an insect, repeating one sentence again and again. A recording. A closed loop of tape.

When the senile patient awakens in the morning and asks for his mother, remind him that she is long since dead, that he is over eighty years old and living in a convalescent home, and that this is 1992 and not 1913 and that he must face reality and the fact that

In addition, no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won.