Quotes About Memory

That's the difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American blacks. They vow never to forget, and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity.

Feigned or not, sometimes I'm jealous of Hominy's oblivousness, because he, unlike America, has turned the page. That's the problem with history, we like to think of it's a book – that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn't the paper it's printed on. It's memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.

That's the difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American blacks. They vow never to forget, and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity. We want someone like Foy Cheshire to present our case to the world with a set of instructions that the jury will disregard centuries of ridicule and stereotype and pretend the woebegone niggers in front of you are starting from scratch. Foy

That's the problem with history, we like to think it's a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn't the paper it's printed on. It's memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.

If you want to teach something quickly, reinforce it every time. But if you want it to stick once the teaching phase is over, reinforce it occasionally

Most relevant for the purposes here, one lucky accident of this feature of memory is that pain-then-pleasure is recalled as better than pleasure-then-pain. Because of this, even if the amount of pain, taken in isolation, is the same as the amount of pleasure, if the pain comes first, the distortions of memory decrease the pain and increase the pleasure, improving the whole experience.

The duration of felt experience—our feeling of right now—is between two and three seconds, about how long it takes Paul McCartney to sing the words "Hey Jude." Everything before this is memory; everything after is anticipation. So what about a life dedicated entirely to improving this moving window of two to three seconds?

How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it's having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.

From a neuroscience perspective we are all divided and discontinuous. The mental processes underlying our sense of self-- feelings, thoughts, memories-- are scattered through different zones of the brain. There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul. No soul-pilot. They come together in a work of fiction. A human being is a story-telling machine. The self is a story.

Ambition distorts even memory itself. John Quincy Adams

DUMB AUTUMN SMELLS. The marguerite, unbroken, passed between home and chasm through your memory. A strange lostness was palpably present, almost you would have lived.

You Were My Death You were my death: you I could hold when all fell away from me.

The world is gone, I have to carry you.

He who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it.

The land of familiarity belongs to the dead

People were asked to recall and rank those past decisions that they most regret.

Ni la búsqueda de justicia con ánimo vengativo por parte de los vencedores ni el olvido por decreto son actitudes deseables.

Als je Proust gelezen hebt, is je leven veranderd.

Take a second to recall your last holiday. How much did you enjoy it? Would you go back again? If you are anything like other people, two factors will explain your answers: the peak moment of pleasure or pain and the final moment of pleasure or pain. This is known as the peak-end effect.50 Further, your overall assessment of an experience doesn't even pay that much attention to how long it lasted. This is known as duration neglect.

The failure to remember is not a lie, although liars will often try to excuse their lies, once discovered, by claiming a memory failure. It is not uncommon to forget actions that one regrets, but if the forgetting truly has occurred, we should not consider that a lie. for there was no choice involved. Often it will not be possible to determine whether a memory failure has occurred or whether its invocation is itself a lie.

Father Polda smiled in the darkness. None of the saints had been left out. A big, generous man, he was meticulous with regard to the catalogue of the holy, and even though those whose duty it was to deal with witches and dragons might be thought to have been outmoded by the modernity that was coming to the mountains, he was glad they were still included for politeness' sake and memory of past favors, if nothing else.

Introducing change is like pulling off a bandage : the pain is a memory as soon as you feel it.

Remembering is painful, it's difficult, but it can be inspiring and it can give wisdom.