Quotes About Memory

What happens when we die? Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us

Forgetfulness is the catalytic germ of spontaneous creativity

For mysterious reasons, many authors consider it useful to provide a story about a forty-year-old man-about-town with a prologue drawn from his life as a five-year-old boy. ... There's only one letter's difference between "yarn" and "yawn," and it is often a long letter, filled with childhood memories.

The enchantments of the past must always become the disenchantments of the future. But memory, a preservative, may intervene. The embalmer of original enchantments, it is the only human faculty that can outwit the advance of chronological time. Art, the embalmer of memory, is the only human vocation in which the time regained by memory can be permanently fixed.

Jews in the Old Country called the cemetery the 'Village of the Still-Living'. I'd like to be remembered by loved ones so strongly in that way, as if I'm still here, wouldn't you? I would.

When I returned, I never once walked past the house where my mother, aunt, and I lved together...It was as if the past would judge me. The house would judge me. That merely looking at it would somehow cause me to calibrate my life, and in all aspects of usefulness I would come up short.

Today I fell to the ground at the pull of memory. There quite seemed a permanence to my defeat. And here I thought, in their profound tug-of-war, present and future would, by sheer shouldering force of will and superior numbers, win out over the past. How wrong I was. —Marghanita Laski

Closure is cowardice. When you lose someone you love, the memory of them maintains a tenacious adhesiveness to the heart

All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still; after she is dead.

We don't often remember our lives in original chronologies, do we? More in associative patterns

I've said often that every enterprise and organization has a memory. And those memories create a path for people to follow.

One of the terrible tragedies, for me, was the fact that my father passed away before he could witness what I achieved.

I'll never forget what my dad said as we drove over the Peace Bridge towards Canada for the Etobicoke tournament. He said, "Tom, I'll tell you something I want you to always remember. Pretty much everything is cleverer in Canada." I didn't even know cleverer was a word, but after traveling there a few times, I had to agree with him. Everything was cleverer in Canada!

8000 B.C.: Mistaking Irish Channel for heavy fog, Scottish shepherds wander into Ireland. They miss their sheep and go home, but memory lingers for hours.

It is too easy for the sheer mass of big data to overwhelm the sorts of healthy skepticism that is required to defeat deception. And now, with so much of our lives being tied up with giant electronic memory systems, it is almost trivial for terabytes of data to accumulate on almost any topic.

The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.

You cannot go around and keep score. If you keep score on the good things and the bad things, you'll find out that you're a very miserable person. God gave man the ability to forget, which is one of the greatest attributes you have. Because if you remember everything that's happened to you, you generally remember that which is the most unfortunate.

Remuer les morts avec des fleurs et des larmes par douce vengeance

Herleid tot zijn eenvoudigste vorm komt mijn besluit hierop neer, dat u de gebeurtenis weg hebt willen dringen uit uw bewustzijn. Waarschijnlijk heeft de overigens ongegronde wroeging om het feit, dat u de man niet helpen kon, u parten gespeeld en zich tot een schuldgevoel gefixeerd. Men vergeet echter niet, wat men wil vergeten.

Pourtant les analogies entre le récit scientifique et ces mythes sont indéniables... S'agit-il d'une coïncidence ? Ou d'un savoir intuitif ? nous sommes nous memes composés de la poussière du Big Bang. Peut-être portons-nous en nous la mémoire de l'univers ?

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

Now, where did I leave my time-machine? Oh I know, next Wednesday.

Then there are the books that shine in my memory, milestones along the horizontal course of my life. I remember not just the books themselves but the chair I sat in, the shoes I wore, the woman I loved, what song was on the charts at the time. None of which makes them good books, exactly, although all of them are — it just means that they are mine. They really happened.

I am a great admirer of Leopold II, although I think that he should be destroyed in the memory of mankind and reduced to the state in which I presented him in my play, namely a dirty goblin who as soon as he does something of any interest must be raised in order to become a fully-fledged human being.