Quotes About Memory

The only truly dead are those who have been forgotten.

Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. "Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.

You remind me of everything that followed.

One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist.

There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding.

It felt almost like a dream from long ago. I remembered another Ji-li, one who was always praised by her teachers and respected by her classmates. A Ji-li who always pushed herself to do better, achieve more.

After thinking so much about that time, I wanted to do something for the little girl I had been, and for all the children who lost their childhoods as I did. This book is the result.

Learning to read again was by far the hardest thing I had to do. I don't know if those cells in my brain had died or what, but I had no recollection that reading was something I had ever done before, and I thought the concept was ridiculous.

I never crush a relationship dead, I once boasted. Meaning: I always leave something in case I want to pick it up later.)

Create cheat sheets to help new info stick in your brain better.

When you're deep in study mode, stop every thirty minutes to review what you've just learned. Repeat the information you just covered out loud to yourself. This helps cement it in your brain even more when you want to recall it.

Chunking strategies minimize mental chaos and increase recall.

The past is what's written down. It is very quiet; only people who can write make any sound at all.

Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.

To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind. Stories are full of power and force; they seethe with meaning, with truths and lies, evasions and honesty. Speech often has far more weight and urgency than writing. But most words, once spoken, are forgotten, while writing lasts, a point observed early in the seventeenth century by an English vicar named Samuel Purchas.

They put chains on me they chained my waist, my legs. Put me in the back of a squad car, and I literally blacked out. I didn't even - there's whole pieces missing.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago

Story was magic. Magic was story. Memory was also story, disparate events linked together in our mind to create a narrative.

There are events in one's life which, no matter how remote, never fade from memory

Yet there still was love, the placid love that only time can cultivate, a love preserved by habit and by memory. Their tree had little rising sap, perhaps, but it was held firm by deep and ancient roots.

Death steals everything except our stories.

The Statue of Liberty, that frequently malevolent bitch, has an enormous tumor in her gut that has spread to her brain and eyes. With regard to the Native Americans she has Alzheimer's or mad cow disease and can't remember her past, and her blind eyes can't see the terrifying plight of most of the Indian tribes. Meanwhile she blows China and stomps Cuba to death, choosing to forget the Native cultures she has already destroyed.

Excess aspartame and glutamate may be able to gradually destroy neuronal pathways, causing memory loss, brain lesions, and dementia often well before any chronic illness is apparent.