Quotes About Memory

I don't much like looking back.

Writing plays fast and loose with the past.

The memory loss made me jittery at times.

I'm not a fan of people romanticizing their loved ones in death.

Marjorie Luke was funny and huge, or at least I remember her that way.

The thing about lying is, it is quite exhausting - you have to remember a lot.

A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.

I've often asked myself, how much information can the brain actually hold? There'll probably come a day when you're able to download it; that's what you have to do when the machine's full.

Madonna was my favorite when I was a little kid.

I literally can't get anywhere now without the map on my phone. I used to use an A-Z when I first came to London, and now I really struggle because there's no dot to show where I am. And I think that part of my brain doesn't work any more.

I'm not sure I believe in the whole 'ghost-afterlife' thing, but I think places are marked by people who have been there.

It's only Ã¢â'¬Â¦ well, it seems odd, is all. I only wondered, did ye ever think of that, yourself—having lost your mother young, I mean?" "Yes." My face was buried in his chest, my voice muffled in the folds of his shirt. "I used to—when I was younger. Like going on a journey without a map.

He scarcely saw his parents. When Christopher was small, he was terrified that he would meet Papa out walking in the Park one day and not recognize him.

This wood," Yam told him, "is like human memory. It does not need to take events in their correct order. Do you wish to go to an earlier time and start from there?" "Would I understand more if I did?" Hume asked. "You might," said Yam. "Both of us might." "Then it's worth a try," Hume agreed. They went together down the left-hand fork.

You can't alter the past. The only thing you can alter is the future. People write stories pretending you can alter the past, but it can't be done. All you can do to the past is remember it wrong or interpret it differently, and that's no good to us.

We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.

for most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory -- no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto -- and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.

Studies show that the IQ range of most creative people is surprisingly narrow, around 120 to 130. Higher IQs can perform certain kinds of tasks better--logic, feats of memory, and so on. But if the IQ is much higher or lower than that, the window of creativity closes. Nonetheless, for some reason we believe more is better, so people yearn for tip-top IQs, and that calls for bigger memories. A fast, retentive memory is handy, but no skeleton key for survival.

Still, though no one is an island, most are peninsulas. Our lives wouldn't make sense without personal memories pinned like butterflies against the velvet backdrop of social history.

Man is a messenger who forgot the message

So couples relive romantic memories, families watch home movies, and friends catch up with each other, as if they've lagged behind on a trail. Sifting memory for saliences to report, they reveal how vital pieces of their identity have changed. Aging, we tailor memories to fit our evolving silhouette, and as life's vocabulary changes, memories change to fathom the new order. Lose your memory, and you may drift in an alien world.

It took me even longer to understand that, once you have reached a certain age, you can no longer suffer one loss at a time, that loss is cumulative and, with each new experience of it, all your old losses will join forces and come back en masse to haunt you again.

Did she really remember that day so clearly or was she making it up as she went along?

Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head.