Quotes About Memory

All the good things in her came into us. Now we keep her alive, with whatever we can remember

She remembers the secret from her days onstage: Mobilize your inner will. Summon all the memory of a life lived. Hold it in your head: Right and wrong. The truth, self-evident. Nothing has more power than simple conviction.

He can't remember when the Web wasn't here. That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

Mobilize your inner will. Summon all the memory of a life lived. Hold it in your head: Right and wrong. The truth, self-evident. Nothing has more power than simple conviction.

Memory) A few dozen cells, slung together in a lowly slug: already an infinitely reshaping machine, halfway to knowing. Matter that shaped other matter, a plastic record of light and sound, place and motion, change and resistance.

La nostra vita a U. non somigliava affatto ai nostri ricordi. U. era cambiata in tutto, fuorché nei particolari. (p. 225)

She stands with her nose in the bark, perversely intimate. She doses herself for a long time, like a hospice patient self-administering morphine. Chemicals rush down her windpipe, through the bloodstream to her body's provinces across the blood-brain barrier and into her thoughts. The smell grips her brain stem until she and the dead man are fishing side by side again, under the pine shade where the fish hide, in the soul's innermost national park.

She looks for the towering black locust, with its fragrant racemes and pea-pod seeds, the tree that stunned Muir into becoming a naturalist. But the world-changing locust was cut down twelve years before.

The past tries to kill her—all the people they were or had hoped to be.

I'd been hearing that tune for sixty years. Musical taste changes so little. The sound of late childhood plays at our funerals.

IT'S INDIANA, 1990. Here, five years is a generation, fifty is archaeology, and anything older shades off into legend. And yet, places remember what people forget.

I tell him, people very stupid. They forget everything—where they come from, where they go. I say: Don't worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.

Civilization will fade away, but that will go on forever.

The past always comes clearer, in the future.

The turtledove, swallow and crane keep the time of their coming, says Jeremiah. only people fail to recall the order of the Lord.

The scent retrieves all kinds of things he once knew and reminds him of all those things he never will.

Quando rientrai in ufficio, l'immagine della donna che sale per le scale era diventata, a furia di riproiettarmela nella mente, una di quelle repliche di spettacoli in seconda serata di cui vorresti vedere una versione restaurata (p. 310)

Von Neumann at six joked with his father in classical Greek and had a truly photographic memory: he could recite entire chapters of books he had read.392 Edward Teller, like Einstein before him, was exceptionally late in learning—or choosing—to talk.393 His grandfather warned his parents that he might be retarded, but when Teller finally spoke, at three, he spoke in complete sentences.

C. P. Snow, who was also present, remembers the performance as "one of the shortest accounts ever made about a major discovery." When tall and birdlike Chadwick finished speaking he looked over the assembly and announced abruptly, "Now I want to be chloroformed and put to bed for a fortnight.

Twentieth Century Book of the Dead.

Men like to recall, in later years, what they said at some important or possibly historic moment in their lives. . . . I remember only too well what I said to General Somervell that day. I said, "Oh." As

The sweetest sounds I'll ever hear are still inside my head.

But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

This seems to have been St. Augustine's very notion of memory, not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing.