Quotes About Memory

If we want to understand the process of Nature in itself, we could say that Nature is the memory of the world.

Memory deforms reality, which nevertheless is formed as reality only in memory

Traumatic experience does not survive as a representation in the mode of objective consciousness and as a 'dated' moment; it is of its essence to survive only as a manner of being and with a certain degree of generality.

The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.

Reflection only fully grasps itself if it refers to the pre-reflective fund it presupposes, upon which it draws, and that constitutes for it, like an original past, a past that has never been present.

Memory is the irruption of other things in us.

Forgetfulness and rnemory recalled are two modes of our oblique relation with a past that is present to us only through the determinate void that it leaves in us. These phenomenological descriptions are always somewhat misleading because they limit themselves to unraveling the negative in the positive and the positive in the negative.

Every memory reopens lost time and invites us to again take up the situation that it evokes.

Sedimentation is: trace of the forgotten and thereby a call to thought which depends upon itself and goes farther...It is the experience of a resumption which is not totalization, and which precisely for that reason is able to open another development of knowledge.

There must be a presence of the past which is absence.

I want to be alone and work until the day my heads hits the drawing table and I'm dead. Kaput. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They're nowhere. I know they're nowhere and they don't exist, but if nowhere means that's where they are, that's where I want to be.

I saw [Linus Pauling] as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century's greatest chemist. No doubt about it.

When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.

Das schönste an einem Kuß ist jawohl, daß er nicht siebzig Jahre dauert. Es stelle sich jeder mal vor, er würde noch heute im Rachen dessen wühlen, den er als erstes küßte!

Of these years nought remains in memory but the sad feeling that we have advanced and only grown older.

The first pages of memory are like the old family Bible. The first leaves are wholly faded and somewhat soiled with handling. But, when we turn further, and come to the chapters where Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise, then, all begins to grow clear and legible.

Remember the dead do not eat actual solid food, any more than the gods do. They eat the spirit of the food. The priests say a picture of food, or words describing food are as tasty and pleasing as the real thing, to a dead person.

day from Gubla when she first noticed it missing.

Why replicate this world that has gone? Because it was so perfect? But it was not. But it was. Perfect because it was the world before the world changed.

Now can it be men die and carry thence no memory of death, only this curious lightness of the hands, only this curious darkness of the mind, only to be still changeless with the winters passing; not gray, not lined, not stricken down, but stamped forever on the moving air, and echo and an image?

Schubert is said to have told a friend that his own creative process consisted in "remembering a melody" that neither he nor anyone else had ever thought of before.

Who are the scholars who get 'rattled' in the recitation room?" asked William James. "Those who think of the possibilities of failure and feel the great importance of the act. Who are those who do recite well? Often those who are most indifferent. Their ideas reel themselves out of their memories of their own accord.

After you've done this, you can go back into your past and find a "successful" memory, an occasion when you did something well. Again, this could be as simple as tying your shoes for the first time or writing your name in school. When it happened is irrelevant. How "big" the success was doesn't matter either. All that matters is that the memory triggers a positive, happy, feel-good experience in you right now.

The summer that I was ten–Can it be there was only onesummer that I was ten?The Centaur [1958]