Quotes About Memory

I suspect that pleasure is mainly used to turn off parts of the brain so you can keep fresh the memories of things you're trying to learn. It protects the short-term memory buffers. That's one theory of pleasure.

When we write about Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least, suspended literature. One can only write a black novel about Auschwitz or - you should excuse the expression - a cheap serial, which begins in Auschwitz and is still not over.

From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past.

It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you.

The Holocaust, taken by itself, is a black hole. To look at it directly is to be swallowed up by it.

The same way I run now, I swear, is the same way I ran when I was 6 years old.

I was Sweater Queen at Bowling Green State University. Oh, that's a laugh, isn't it?

As a memoirist, I may claim to write the easier-to-remember things, but I could also just be writing to sweep them away. 'Don't bother me about my past,' I'll say, 'It's out in paperback now.'

People don't remember. Revenge is sweet.

The circus leaves a sweet memory.

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

In 'Sweet Days of Discipline,' the narrator, years after graduating, fortuitously encounters her old friend Frederique at a movie theatre. Frederique invites her home.

Obviously, losing a parent is very difficult. I miss my dad every day, but I know he would be proud to see me continuing to swim and going for another shot at the Olympics.

One of my earliest childhood memories is my father taking me in the evening to Samena Swim & Recreation Club in Bellevue.

I think I learned how to swim before I could walk.

You obviously don't really forget how to play the old songs; you just don't have to spend so much time convincing yourself that you remember them. Way less mental energy is spent swimming around in lyrics you've already written and chords you've already played.

There's a Diebenkorn painting - 'Ocean Park No. 68' - that is the color of a swimming pool and always reminds me of summers at the beach.

I was probably about 13 or 14. I got pulled from a rope swing and some boy kicked me in the head and fractured my skull. It was a horrible time.

I was having these terrible back pains, and then one day in Switzerland, things got very bad. My wife Maryanna called the hotel doctor, but I don't remember any of this, I was out of it. I had an operation, and I was nearly lost.

Series of syllables which have been learned by heart, forgotten, and learned anew must be similar as to their inner conditions at the times when they can be recited.

The relation of repetitions for learning and for repeating English stanzas needs no amplification. These were learned by heart on the first day with less than half of the repetitions necessary for the shortest of the syllable series.

Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.

Grief is only the memory of widowed affections.

We hope we can slow or possibly reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's.