Quotes About Memory

The catch is that, when this generation passes, its immunity passes with it. When cocaine again became fashionable during the 1970s, baby boomers had no living memory of its downside. Having sampled and survived the forbidden fruit of cannabis, they were openly skeptical of official warnings about cocaine and other drugs.

The challenge of history is to recover the past and introduce it to the present.

All memory is prelude.

I am no minister of malice," he said, "I would not repel the repentant, but . . . may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between the parties to that . . . bloody conflict. . . . I may say if this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?

By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.

Do those we remember remember us?

Nothing in the universe had a shorter half-life than a politician's memory for inconvenient facts

What if you knew, now, that you wouldn't leave anything behind. That you couldn't leave anything behind. That no one will remember you, and no one will have anything to remember you by. That you are, in fact, just someone who was there, and that's it.

I remembered a friend of mine dying from AIDS, and while he was visiting his family on the coast for the last time, he was seated in the grass during a picnic to which dozens of family members were invited. He looked up from his fried chicken and said, "I just want to die with a big dick in my mouth.

We simplify tens of millions of individuals down into simplistic stereotypes, so that they hold the space of only one individual in our limited available memory slots. And here is the key—those who lie outside the circle are not human. We lack the capacity to recognize them as such.

Good-bye, my dancer, my friend, my One and Only. I love you.

For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.

Words described real experiences, and their curves and lines left a mental trail for me to follow by sense memory, whereas numbers threw curves at me and stonewalled me with their lines, barring me from understanding them, where they came from, and where they went. Math did not describe anything to me; if people themselves were often disconnected parts—sometimes one, sometimes many—how could I hope to quantify the rest of the world? Discrete amounts had little meaning for me.

In a world that has done all it can to erase or obscure the civilizational memory of the West, remembering becomes a moral obligation, and a key to recovering our sanity.

The future is just a memory that has yet to be born

The most visceral science fiction always takes place in the past and focuses on the humdrum

the currency of the future will be memory

The future will one day be a distant memory

When I look at myself in the mirror, I wonder where everything has gone. Even the things I used to remember with so much clarity now seem dimmer. What happens to memory when it vanishes? What happens to events when everyone who remembers them ceases to remember?

men who have erectile dysfunction are at much higher risk of having heart disease, memory loss, dementia, or stroke as their arteries are often clogged throughout their body.

What tame, memory-dependent work I was doing. How polite my poems were, how still they sat, how representational. We poets talked about craft, but what we meant were tricks and illusions.

I stepped closer still. He closed his eyes again and covered my hand with his own. 'You smell of violets. You always smell of violets,' he said. 'You've no idea how many times I have walked these moors and smelled them and thought you were near. On and on I walked, following the scent of you, and you were never there. When I saw you in the hall tonight, I thought I had finally gone mad.

The men stood back, chanting a song of one who would not be forgotten, of loved ones lost and returned to the earth, and of the land itself which does not die but is always born anew with each fall of the long rains. They chanted of life, which is short as a spear of summer grass or long as the heart of the Rift itself, and of the silent land that waits beyond.

He grinned. "You realise I'm reporting for duty on the second of January?" "Good. Then the last memory you'll have of me is wearing a party frock and knocking back cocktails while I kick old 1914 right in the teeth. Let's send it off in style. (Delilah and Johnny)