Quotes About Memory

Odd, how some little incident, some snatch of conversation comes back to one again and again in the most unlikely places.

The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.

To someone who has not had a parent stolen from them, I can only attempt to explain how it feels. It's like having part of yourself hacked off without warning. Afterwards, they become like a phantom limb: you're sure they're still present because you can feel them, you communicate with them, but you just can't see them.

Using audio to describe a complex visual leverages the dual channels of our limited working memory. While the eyes view a visual, the words that enter the ears access the auditory centers of working memory and thus maximize its limited capacity.

However, imagine that instead of working a problem, you are reviewing an example. Your working memory is free to carefully study the example and learn from it. In fact, by providing an example as a model, the student has an opportunity to build their own mental model from it. In other words, the example is a vehicle to enable borrowing knowledge acquired by others.

our brains are designed for best learning when less loaded.

One of the many difficult things about women was that they tended to pick the most unsuitable times to tell you something they considered to be important, and then became irrationally upset when you failed to remember it.

I seem to remember sitting on a golden bench, and she started chattering about the sunset, or something. She seemed quite happy so I let her get on with it. Then she got hold of my hand and asked me what I was thinking about. So I said, "The treatment of anal fistulae".

I'm not sure how you do this to me. I barely remember you whole, just the hair or beard, the legs, arms, all separate, never as one man who searched desperately in the dark for music without words to make love to.

The the Shoah involved millions of people, it was a unique experience for each of them.

I have just described an unforgettable event in my life, and yet I hardly ever get a chance to speak of it. It doesn't fit the framework of social discourse.

It had been an occasion for reminiscing, but there are limits. And so my childhood falls into a black hole.

The Shoah involved millions of people, it was a unique experience for each of them.

Wars, and hence the memories of wars, are owned by the male species. And facism is a decidely male property, whether you were for or against it. Besides, women have no past, or aren't supposed to have one. A man can have an interesting past, a woman only indecent.

That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.

The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn't now, then where did it go ?

I was given some bits of rock sugar and a few flower petals which I did not of course like to throw away so that I was still clutching them on the bus back to Satipur. When I thought Inder Lal was not looking, I respectfully tipped them out the side of the bus, but they have left the palm of my hand sticky and with a lingering smell of sweetness and decay that is still there as I write.

It is strange how, once graves are broken and overgrown in this way, then the people in them are truly dead. The Indian Christian graves at the front of the cemetery, which are still kept up by relatives, seem by contrast strangely alive, contemporary

Wilderness, our original home, is the place from which all life comes, the place that offers us challenge and beauty, adventure and comfort, triumph, and memory.

Your voice still beating inside my skull, as if I could put my fingers through my eyes and pull you out. This dumb external universe.

Without a key, light enters with its hot blond muzzle and lies upon the body; and the body stirs and remembers. — Ruth Stone, from "Light," In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

Music is fragile: people die, and it's forgotten.

Can you still have any famous last words if you're somebody nobody knows?

They carved your name into the stone and then they put it in the ground, I run my fingers through the grooves When no one's around