Quotes About Memory

Adeline, who is the girl that she once was, the bright Victorian girl shut behind dark paneled doors with her thirteen, fifteen, eighteen years of life and a Greek lexicon. She is the girl stopped in time who could not speak or feel at the side of her dead mother's bed. She keeps the cold, clear information of those days, unclouded by revision or the lies of age.

The physiological condition for memory and hence for learning seems to be a certain continuity of organization, which allows the alterations produced by outer sense impressions to be retained as more or less permanent changes of structure or function . Metamorphosis is too radical to leave much lasting record of these changes. It is indeed hard to conceive of a memory of any precision which can survive this process of radical internal reconstruction.

I will never dream again. For I can never again forget who I am. I realized that when I couldn't escape from the pain.

All the nations that ever lived have left their footsteps in the sand. The traces fade with every tide, the echoes grow faint, the images are fractured, the human material is atomized and recycled. But if we know where to look, there is always a remnant, a remainder, an irreducible residue.

REM sleep has also been shown to be particularly important for enhancing our ability to retain emotional memories and for allowing the hippocampus to turn short-term memories of the day before into long-term ones (i.e., it helps make memories more permanent, leading to structural change in the brain).

Then in 1998, two reseachers, Frederick "Rusty" Gage, an American, and Peter Eriksson, of Sweden, discovered such new cells in the human hippocampus. (This discovery is described in detail in Chapter 10 of The Brain That Changes Itself.)

Sharpen Perception and Memory, Increase Speed of Thought, and Heal Learning Problems

The Holocaust industry has always been bankrupt. What remains is to openly declare it so.

first, in order to remember, something must be forgotten; second, the place where memories are stored has no boundaries. In other words, forgetting is a twin; its tandem effect is best called "simultancous" distraction, the instant when one memory defoliates another. This fuzzy double - one devouring the other - presumably inhibits learning

I would prefer to believe that things possess the power of recall, of recollection. That things are memoirs of the existences that once were theirs, if only we knew how to read them.

But because I do not wish to be remembered (if I will be remembered) as a self-indulgent fantasist, I'll skip the purple patch for now, however much I wish to write it. I need to make amends for my indifference, for having turned my back on the world in favor of the beauties of the way. I'll try to study cruelty (I regret my own) and render it in more familiar terms.

We may not realize it, but every point during the passage of our lives is a point of no return -- except for what memory permits.

The most important use to which he had put his memory was that he had stuffed an unprecedented number of mathematical constants and equations into it. Most of us have very few mathematical constants in our mind, perhaps only the up-to-twelve-times multiplication table. Johnny had put in his mind layers and layers of algebraic verities. These were the explanation of his extraordinary powers of mental calculation.

His powers of memory were awe-inspiring, but only about matters on which he had fearsomely concentrated his mind.

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

Very goodlooking people are as a rule more forgetful than the median. Their mothers start it and the world at large continues it, handing them things, picking things up for them, smoothing their vicinity out for them in every way. I on the other hand remember everything.

As you get older three things happen. The first is your memory goes, and I can't remember the other two.

I remember the names of my ancestors. I speak the names of those I love. I speak their names and they live again. May I be so well-loved and remembered. In truth, may the gods hear my name. May I do work with my hands worth remembering.

A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory.

Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make.

Memory's distances, youth's wishes, childhood's dreams, the short joys of a whole long life and hopeless hopes come grey-clad, like evening mist after the sun has set.

Bird misses everything at once. One thing makes her want all the others— lived or not, still she misses them. She misses lives she has never lived— days issued out of the future , hours that will never be.

There was nothing between the man and me - - nothing, not even liking. But because of the memory of some wholeness, or the hope of some regeneration, I would have dropped whatever I'd planned, just to go back to scratching around on his bed.

It is more satisfying to be a bad player at golf. The worse you play, the better you remember the occasional good shot.