Quotes About Memory

What I remember from Ruskin is the phrase the cursed animosity of inanimate objects, which I mutter under my breath when I get in a tangle of wire coat hangers. I also wonder if there is any such thing as an inanimate object.

Adam thus bequeathed us his death, not his sin … We do not inherit the sins of our fathers, even though we may be made to endure their punishment. Guilt cannot be transmitted. We are linked to Adam only by his memory, which becomes our own, and by his death, which foreshadows our own. Not by his sin.

What happens to what's happened? she asked the bishop. It's there. Waiting. But the time gate's closed, isn't it? Yes. But that can't take away what we've had. The good and the bad.

He had even forgotten

she didn't remember much else.

It was true what they had been saying: if people remember you, then you're not dead. It was very comforting.

199. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.

Sometimes one has to know something many times over. Sometimes one forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets again.

And there, by the fire, held in the arms of his mother, in the room in which he learnt to crawl, to eat, to walk, to speak, Hamnet takes his last breath. He draws it in, he lets it out. Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing more.

The leaves crisping at their edges. Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.

The sound that comes out of him is choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bear a great weight. It is a noise of disbelief, of anguish. Anges will never forget it. At the end of her life, when her husband has been dead for years, she will still be able to summon its exact pitch and timbre.

They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much.

Going back to Hemingway's work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be.

There is a concept in cognitive psychology called the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information.

You can do anything in a blackout that you can do when you're drunk," White said. You're just not going to remember it. That could be ordering stuff on Amazon. People tell me this all the time.…People can do very complicated things. Buy tickets, travel, all kinds of things, and not remember.

Our mind, faced with a life-threatening situation, drastically limits the range and amount of information that we have to deal with. Sound and memory and broader social understanding are sacrificed in favor of heightened awareness of the threat directly in front of us.

there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers.

In one of the earliest studies of blackouts, an alcohol researcher named Donald Goodwin gathered ten men from an unemployment line in St. Louis, gave them each the better part of a bottle of bourbon over a four-hour period, then had them perform a series of memory tests. Goodwin writes

Much of what we are told to read and watch, we simply don't remember. The Information Age has created a stickiness problem, but Leventhal and Wonderman's examples suggest that there may be simple ways to enhance stickiness, and systematically engineer stickiness into a message. This is a fact of obvious importance to marketers, teachers, and managers.

Neither Masten nor Rhea believes that clever packaging allows a company to put out a bad-tasting product. The taste of the product itself matters a great deal. Their point is simply that when we put something in our mouth and in that blink of an eye decide whether it tastes good or not, we are reacting not only to the evidence from our taste buds and salivary glands but also to the evidence of our eyes and memories and imaginations

not holding hands, but with their hands just meeting, as though not quite sure they weren't dreaming this, each of them separately on their far bereaved cots, their hands but blown fragments of their memories, half afraid to commingle, yet touching over the howling sea at night.

Remember Oaxaca? The word was like a breaking heart, a sudden peal of stifled bells in a gale, the last syllables of one dying of thirst in the desert.

The more even sounds of the bus wove into Hugh's brain an idiotic syllogism: I am losing the Battle of the Ebro, I am also losing Yvonne, therefore Yvonne is...

If you stop learning, you forget what you ready know.