Quotes About Memory

No matter what I've published - and you can look it up, I've published quite a lot in science, quite a few books too - none of it's very important. All will be forgotten and in a few years time will be a few comments in eight-point type in footnotes at the bottom of the page somewhere.

I used to be a really great dancer. I used to do it quite a lot and then I stopped. Now my body has forgotten all that training.

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off.

I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.

I don't remember anything about '93. I remember going to some Copper World Classic races. I probably had to have been 4 or 5 around then. I probably mostly remember it because of my mom's pictures that she takes all the time.

My first memory of motor racing - I think it was just attending a go kart race.

We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.

I will raise a book to Brian Thomsen.

My earliest political memory is of attending, in 1975, a tub-thumping campaign rally with my father in Adelaide.

The Apple IIc, with its 128KB of RAM, 125KB floppy drive, word processor, and spreadsheet application, did everything I could imagine a computer doing at the time.

In a way, being born is a sort of ecological contagion. When you have longevity of family, we remember our grandfathers and maybe our great-grandfathers. We somehow don't have the capacity in modern life to remember further than that. All of the ramifications of their lives have an effect on us, and we're not aware of it.

I think that people ran out of oxygen and don't really know what happened up there, maybe some of them just made things up because they weren't sure what had happened.

I think the mythology of death really ran away with me when I was very young.

I don't profess to be an expert on anything, or have the memory for who ran in 1952. I am an informed American citizen, that's my position.

I never saw a Laurel & Hardy movie in a theater when they first ran, when I was a kid. But as a child, I knew who they were, and knew the culture of it, what they meant.

I have about a dozen cassettes lying about which I use in random order. Very often, I pick up a cassette to dictate a letter, and I find my voice coming back at me with the lines of plays three years old.

One of my random skills is I have a very strong memory for dialogue and moments, and I don't know why.

That's always a funny thing, when people think they're known for every little thing they ever did, and they're really not.

I read academic books on courtesan culture at the turn-of-the century in Shanghai such as Gail Hershatter's 'The Gender of Memory'. The diaries were mostly in the form of letters from courtesans to a lover who had disappeared or taken their savings.

Whole generations have forgotten history.

Writing about carrying the past on your back is a manifestation of my Irishness, because we go on and on and will for another two or three generations.

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

Geometry was the first exciting course I remember.

Yes, I can still see 'Arcadia' in my mind's eye, that beautiful Georgian room and the actors' moving through it. I loved that idea.