Quotes About Memory

The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.

Geschichten sind unser Gedächtnis, Bibliotheken die Lagerstätten für dieses Gedächtnis und Lesen das Handwerk, mit dem wir dieses Gedächtnis neu erschaffen können, indem wir es rezitieren und glossieren, es wieder in unsere eigene Erfahrung rückübersetzen und so auf dem aufbauen, was frühere Generationen für bewahrenswert hielten.

Lesen ist eine Erinnerungsarbeit, bei der wir durch Geschichten in den Genuss der vergangenen Erfahrungen anderer kommen, als wären es unsere eigenen.

Partly, what we are may be what we believe we once were and lost.

Reading is reclaiming the right to... human immortality, because the memory of writing is all-encompassing and limitless.

Die Freunde, an die ich denke, sind in der Zeit gefangen wie in einem Film. Sie (viele von ihnen sind tot, verschollen) sind in dem Alter, in dem ich sie zuletzt gesehen habe; ich bezweifle, dass sie mich jetzt wiedererkennen würden.

Hier in Buenos Aires träume ich auf Spanisch von Menschen, die nicht sprechen und mich nicht hören - und immer von der Stadt, wie ich sie früher kannte, niemals, wie sie heute ist.

Erinnerungen und Scheinerinnerungen. Ich glaube, mich genau an etwas zu erinnern. Eine Notiz auf dem Nachsatzpapier eines Buches, das ich durch Zufall aufschlage, beweist, dass ich mich irre. Die Sache ist irgendwo anders passiert, mit jemand anderem, zu einer anderen Zeit.

It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.

God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.

Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.

Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars.

Lenina suddenly remembered an occasion when, as a little girl at school, she had woken up in the middle of the night and become aware, for the first time, of the whispering that had haunted all her sleeps.

The sick woman was usurping the place of the healthy one. He was being dragged back from the memory of the sunlit down and the quick, laughing girl, back to this unhealthy, overheated room and its complaining occupant.

You forget, I said, I'm a writer and the Muses are the daughters of Memory.

I think of you so incessantly, so insistently. The thought of you is always there. It lies hidden, a latency, in the most unlikely things and places, ready at the command of some chance association to jump out at me from its ambush.

Encendió un cigarrillo para desinfectar la memoria.

Shanta shook her head emphatically, That would distract your attention, and attention is the whole point. Attention to the experience of something given, something you haven't invented. Not the memory of a form of words addressed to somebody in your imagination.

He wished to ignore all but here and now, to be as though he had only just entered the world and were destined to be eternal. Bus his memory survived, even though he never deliberately made use of it; and though the things which had been Isabels were destoryed, he could not guard against chance reminders. Chance had found many gaps in his defenses this morning.

There's nothing like a re-creation of the event. Which is lucky. Think if one could fully remember perfume or kisses! How wearisome the reality of them would be!

The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945

It is finished. Old Mitsima's words repeated themselves in his mind. Finished, finished....In silence and from a long way off, but violently. desperately, hopelessly, he had loved Kiakimé. And now it was finished. He was sixteen.

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences