Quotes About Memory

Even the memory then, of what once was, will have grown dim in the minds of a generation who, for the whole of their lives, have known nothing but chaos and lawlessness.

Troy itself was disappointingly small. Like little more than your ordinary city block and a few stories in height, practically. Although now that I remember, everything in William Shakespeare's house at Stratford-on-Avon was astonishingly tiny, too. As if only imaginary people had lived there then. Or perhaps it is only the past itself, which is always smaller than one had believed.

In addition to remembering things that one does not know how one remembers, one would also appear to remember things that one has no idea how one knew to begin with.

Helen ran off with a lover only once in her life herself, and for three thousand years nobody would ever let her forget about it.

Planeando su Balzac, Rodin llegó a rastrear a un sastre que el novelista había empleado cuarenta años antes; y le encargó un traje con las medidas del muerto.

Perhaps I have not mentioned the tennis courts.

There is no such thing as forgetting," he murmured.

A dead writer often finds himself at the mercy of something other than friends.

It is the accumulated pressure of feelings that causes thoughts. One feeling, for instance, can create literally thousands of thoughts over a period of time. Think, for instance, of one painful memory from early life, one terrible regret that has been hidden. Look at all the years and years of thoughts associated with that single event. If we could surrender the underlying painful feeling, all of those thoughts would disappear instantly and we would forget the event.

The Gray-LaViolette scientific theory integrates psychology and neurophysiology. Their research demonstrated that feeling tones organize thoughts and memory (Gray-LaViolette, 1981). Thoughts are filed in the memory bank according to the various shades of feelings associated with those thoughts. Therefore, when we relinquish or let go of a feeling, we are freeing ourselves from all of the associated thoughts.

Details can change or go missing entirely, particularly in moments of physical peril. A kind of amnesia goes hand in hand with sickness, and a good thing, too.

What's the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I'll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard.

When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of jazz as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.

There are things you forget naturally-computer passwords, your father's continuing relationship with life-and then there are things you can't forget that you wish you could.

I asked her, dreamily, if we had met, and when she told me that we had not, I gave her a little finger wave, the type a leprechaun might offer a pixie who was floating by on a maple leaf. Well, hi there, I whispered.

For the first time in memory, I was unable to sleep not because I was anxious but because I was excited. To live in a damp crowded asshole and sing--if these guys don't know the secret to living, I don't know who does. (The Grieving Owl, page 157)

On a recent flight from Tokyo to Beijing, at around the time that my lunch tray was taken away, I remembered that I needed to learn Mandarin. "Goddamnit," I whispered. "I knew I forgot something.

In binghamton, new york, winter meant snow, and though I was young when we left, I was able to recall great heaps of it, and use that memory as evidence that North Carolina was, at best, a third-rate institution. What little snow there was would usually melt an hour or two after hitting the ground, and there you'd be in your windbreaker and unconvincing mittens, forming a lumpy figure made mostly of mud. Snow Negroes, we called them. The

Here I am, just turned fifty, and I forgot that my father isn't dead yet!

Now here we were, the shadows lengthening, our spaghetti growing cold, as he hit the half-hundred mark, then blithely sailed beyond it. Whore.

They're pictures you take of yourself with a phone and send to the people you no longer communicate with by talking.

The camera has replaced actual looking and turned life into evidence. It drives me crazy. February 1, 2014

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

Human memory, driven by emotional self-interest, goes to extraordinary lengths to provide evidence to back up whatever understanding of the world we have our hearts set on—however removed that may be from reality.