Quotes About Memory

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,And did he stop and speak to you,And did you speak to him again?How strange it seems, and new!

You can take us out of Arcadia, but you cannot take Arcadia out of us." Nicholas D. Kokonis, psychologist and author of Arcadia, My Arcadia and Out of Arcadia: The American Odyssey of Angelo Vlahos

Paracelsus At times I almost dream I too have spent a life the sages' way, And tread once more familiar paths. Perchance I perished in an arrogant self-reliance Ages ago; and in that act a prayer For one more chance went up so earnest, so Instinct with better light let in by death, That life was blotted out — not so completely But scattered wrecks enough of it remain, Dim memories, as now, when once more seems The goal in sight again.

Ae Fond Kiss

that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment.

Collecting quotations is an insidious, even embarrassing habit, like ragpicking or hoarding rocks or trying on other people's laundry. I got into it originally while trying to break an addiction to candy. I kicked candy and now seem to be stuck with quotations, which are attacking my brain instead of my teeth.

Another problem with service-level decoupling is that it is expensive, both in development time and in system resources. Dealing with service boundaries where none are needed is a waste of effort, memory, and cycles. And, yes, I know that the last two are cheap—but the first is not.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence on memory that shows memories are constructed by all of us and that the construction is a mixture of fact and fiction. Something similar is true for perception. Our perceptions are constructions that are a mixture of sense data processed by the brain and other data that the brain supplies to fill in the blanks.

Psychologists call this natural tendency to be selective in both our memory and our perception confirmation bias. People with strong convictions often take confirmation bias to a level known as motivated reasoning. The more evidence one presents against their belief, the more motivated they become to refute the evidence and defend their conviction.

Little boy crying. "My daddy has been dead for 10 yrs, but he came to town to vote for Lyndon Johnson, and didn't come to see me.

What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it.

Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be scuttled by the storm.

Suddenly I wanted the earlier version back, but there was no retrieving it. When I blurred the lines to soften them it was as if she began to disappear.

Vanished children, I can't think where I lost them...

And the strange thing was that it felt absolutely familiar, the curve of her arm under my hand and the weight of her head against my shoulder: not discovered but remembered. She felt the way I had always known she would feel. Even the tang of her fear was familiar.

Brian took her hand a final time, then turned and walked away. Lise sat at the table a while longer. The cooling air from the patio was pleasant. The stars were coming out. Mahmud poured coffee from a silver carafe. What we cannot remember, we must rediscover. "I'm sorry—did you say something?" "I said, it's getting dark." Mahmud smiled. "It's these sunsets. Seems like they go on forever.

Things that happened hundreds of years ago are very much a part of your thinking right now...The past lives in us.

To go along with this self-control, we must do whatever we can to cultivate a greater memory capacity—one of the most important skills in our technologically oriented environment.

You can never be sure who you are dealing with. A man who is of little importance and means today can be a person of power tomorrow. We forget a lot in our lives, but we rarely forget an insult.

Daily Law: Ask someone who recalls your childhood what they remember about your interests. Get reacquainted with those early passions. Mastery, I: Discover Your Calling—The Life's Task

Nothing is more important to a nation than its history. It is the earth upon which any society stands.

Everybody tends to heighten his own reality. We start with a private fantasy about our lives and perhaps one day, for fun, we turn it into an anecdote. No harm is done. Over the years, the anecdote is repeated so regularly it becomes accepted as a fact. Quite soon, to contradict this fact would be embarrassing. In time, we probably come to believe it was true all along. And by these slow accretions of myth, like a coral reef, the historical record takes shape.

But really, why would one bother to imitate anything so vulnerable and unreliable, or with such built-in obsolescence: a central processing unit that could be utterly destroyed because some ancillary mechanical part – the heart, say, or the liver – suffered a temporary interruption? It was like losing a Cray supercomputer and all of its memory files because a plug needed changing.