Quotes About Memory

A mammal never forgets a bad scare; and they were mammals.

Memory is a haunting.

It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.

It's fragile what we know. It's gone every time we forget. Then someone has to learn it all over again.

The past is always gone," Wahram said. "Whether the place is still there or not.

It was so hard to imagine that a mind could be gone. All those thoughts that you never tell anyone, all those dreams, all that entire pocket universe: gone. A character unlike any other character, a consciousness. It didn't seem possible.

Oh God, Coyote said, and rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one hand. It's hard to remember something that long ago. It's almost like an epic poem I memorized once, and can barely recite anymore.

Strange how one remembered faces until you tried to look at them in your mind, when they turned away from you.

A hurt mammal never forgets. Epigenetic theory suggests an almost Lamarckian transfer down the generations; some genes are activated by experiences, others are not.

A hurt mammal never forgets. Epigenetic theory suggests an almost Lamarckian transfer down the generations; some genes are activated by experiences, others are not. Genes, language, history: what it all meant in actual practice was that fear passed down through the years, altering organisms for generation after generation, thus altering the species. Fear, an evolutionary force.

Moscow, Baikonur, the view from Novy Mir—none of it. Her mother's face across the kitchen

A mammal never forgets a hurt;

Destruction is creation. Become as a little child. Language as space, a kind of mathematical notation, geometric locations in the lab of memory. Reading. Maps. Codes, substitutions, the secret names of things. The glorious inrush of a word. The joy of chatter. Every color's wavelength, by number.

Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully into the moment, and dream.

Memory is a haunting. You remember times you liked, and you want something like them. But you can only get new things. So I try to want what I get. It isn't obvious how to do it.

Memory was mind. And so, by a simple transitive equation, memory equaled life. So that with memory gone, life was gone.

We remember more than we think we do. More than we want to, sometimes.

Oh I miss you Hetti Moore But there's no one here left to tell - The world has gone black before my eyes.

When memory fails to contain us we must love the past more than ever, to hold it to us—or else the present becomes a meaningless blaze of color and sound, in which no two humans, great elongate beings, will be able to do more than touch at their very lips, their spatial selves—no one will ever truly understand another. To love the past is to become fully human.

They made a silly mistake though,' the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory.

The only way a man could defy time was to leave behind buildings that would not die.

Life teaches me a hundred things every day, and I forget ninety-nine of them, sometimes all hundred of them.

Memories are made of peculiar stuff, elusive and yet compelling, powerful and fleet. You cannot trust your reminiscences, and yet there is no reality except the one we remember......

Gladness is intoxicating. I fire my gun and an unforgettable echo answers from crag to crag, floats out over the sea and rings in some sleepless helmsman's ears. What am I glad about? A thought that comes to me, a memory, a sound in the forest, a human being. I think of her—I close my eyes and stand still on the road and think of her, counting the minutes.