Quotes About Memory

William James speculated that subjective time was measured in novel experiences, which become rarer as you get older.

The expectation of an event creates a much deeper impression … than the event itself."—de la Vega.)

The eyes were of a color which he could never decide on, afterwards when he told the story he used to say they were the color of everything in Spring.

I can believe a miracle because I can raise my own arm. I can believe a miracle because I can remember. I can believe it because I can speak and be understood by you. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Unitarian minister and essayist

The second certainty is associated with spirit, as in Pasternak's novel, Dr. Zhivago, when the physician says to a young woman dying of cancer, "Your spirit will live on, you know. Your spirit is you in others, others in you.

This is why the past seems perfect, a time of proportion and order, because it is immersed in speech. For animals, memory might reside as a sensation, a resonance in the nerves, or in the meat of the spine. But for humans, the past cannot be described except in words. It is nowhere else.

Sometimes, coming home in the early morning like this, I'd imagine things had altered while I was absent: a knife on the bread board that I didn't remember leaving out, a book face down on the table, a cup brimming with tea and dishwater in the sink. The evidence I wanted didn't need to be too elaborate or detailed. I could have constructed an entire afterlife from a half-moon of lemon rind or a small blister of jam on the tablecloth.

No Memory happens in the past. To say this in so many words is, no doubt, to state the obvious - our memories happen now, in the madeleine- and tisane-tinctured present - but it strikes me as peculiar, still, that my recollections have so little to do with historical time.

but the young dead stay with us, they color our dreams, they make us wonder about ourselves, that we should be so unlucky, or clumsy, or so downright ordinary as to carry on without them. Yet

The version of you who forgot his love, a creature more lithotroph than human, failed to pull the trigger, but died on the field of honor. Some say he turned his gun on himself before you shot him." Montrose put his face in his hands. He shot himself in a duel for love of Rania. He remembered having done something like this before.

But the nimbleness of the human mind in searching out heaven and earth and the secrets of nature, and when all ages have been compassed by its understanding and memory, in arranging each thing in its proper order, and in inferring future events from past, clearly shows that there lies hidden in man something separate from the body.

That there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead, the memory of which he constantly renews and occasionally enlarges, that all to a man being aware that there is a God, and that he is their Maker, may be condemned by their own conscience when they neither worship him nor consecrate their lives to his service.

The gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue, but of life. It cannot be grasped by reason and memory only, but it is fully understood when it possesses the whole soul and penetrates to the inner recesses of the heart.

Many Nobel Prizes are awaiting good research to understand and explain the many mysteries of our bodies, such as the basic mechanism of memory or imagination.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

I once knew a word I forget That mean "I am sorry we met And I wish you the same." It sounds like your name But I haven't remember that yet.

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?My friends forsake me like a memory lost.

O words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away

Remember us better than we are.

Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.

Não!, nem o passar dos anos, nem as voltas do destino poderiam apagar a impressão fulminante que ele causou em mim... Sim! querido objeto de minha primeira paixão, guardarei para sempre a lembrança de tua primeira aparição diante de meus olhos embevecidos... ela te traz de volta ao presente, e eu te vejo diante de mim!

something we are poorly developed to retain, e.g., a phone number), into something easier to remember (and that we are better developed to remember).

I slipped from present to past, sliding down the snake heads of memory into what was and what would never be again.

Sometimes he would forget her, but in forgetting he would remember her again, and the ache for her would return with a vengeance.