Quotes About Memory

Taleb suggests that we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.

Words that you have seen before become easier to see again—you can identify them better than other words when they are shown very briefly or masked by noise, and you will be quicker (by a few hundredths of a second) to read them than to read other words. In short, you experience greater cognitive ease in perceiving a word you have seen earlier, and it is this sense of ease that gives you the impression of familiarity.

I'm inspired by my surroundings. That's why I create dresses or videos around simple everyday things! I also love playing with nostalgic things from my childhood like cartoons. I like my art to trigger some sort of memory from my viewers, something they can relate to.

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

The French, perhaps more than any other nation, cherish the memory of their dead by ornamenting their places of sepulture with the finest flowers, often renewing the garlands and replacing such plants as decay with vigorous and costly ones.

Villa Grande has in many ways symbolized an important, but less than pleasant, part of our history.

I grew up in the East Village with a lot of old people in my building, and I'm not sure if they lost their sense of smell over the years, but they always seemed to smell like they poured a bottle of perfume on themselves. I never want to become that person.

This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli was a little village - that's all gone.

I don't really know the story of the Pied Piper. I don't read stories, first of all. I just remember either a rabbit or a rat leading people out of the village with a flute. That's all I can tell you.

I used to live in a village, and I always loved listening to old people. Unfortunately, it was always women who were talking, because after the war, very few men were around. I spent my entire life living in the village. The village is always talking about itself; people are talking to each other as the village makes sense of itself.

My dad was in the RAF, so we travelled quite a lot. My memory's not the best - I remember we lived in Belgium for a bit - but I grew up in a village called Compton in Newbury.

I don't even know when my father admitted me to school. During those days in villages, people did not remember the exact date a child was born. It was usually only the season that they remembered.

When something happens far back in the past, people often can't recall exact details. Blame depends upon point of view. There may be a villain, but reality is frustrating because it's often ambiguous.

We should tell the honest, painful stories of 9/11 because it dishonors the memory of heroes to invent a phony cast of villains when the actual terrorists were terrible enough to tear open this nation's heart.

When you think of a Vine video, it's like thinking about an experience you've had, which people can relate to.

I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.

To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation.

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

When you grow up in a violent home, the fights, the screaming, the pain all blur together. To survive, you block as much of it out of your head as you can in the moment. You try to forget it going forward.

NMDA receptors are concentrated in the areas that control learning and memory, higher functions like multitasking, and some of the more subtle aspects of personality. When the immune system makes antibodies that attack these receptors, people may have seizures and violent fits.

I remember my father banging away on an IBM Selectric in the garage. He wrote his first novels on that machine. I remember its pebbly surface, its cold heft. It made its mark, literally and violently.

My grandma has a picture of Louis Farrakhan playing violin in her house.

Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

I lost my virginity when I was 14. And I haven't been able to find it.