Quotes About Memory

I swam, the sea was boundless, I saw no shore. Tanit was merciless, my prayers were answered. O you who drown in love, remember me. —INSCRIPTION ON A CARTHAGINIAN FUNERARY URN

Stories are no good, not even the short ones, because by the time you get to the second page he's forgotten the beginning. Where are we without our plots?

I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water. I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there.

The war at Troy seemed to grow in song, poetry, and story all the while. As it faded from living memory, it grew larger and larger. Men claimed descent from one or the other of the heroes, or, failing that, anyone who had fought in the war, which now assumed the stature of a clash between the gods and the titans.

In France her tutor had once taught her that to truly fix an image in the mind to fasten it down completely so that it remained forever captive and vivid she should carefully name each aspect of the thing to herself as though she were describing it to a blind person. For ma petite such is the fickleness of the human mind that it soon lets go of whatever it sees if you would keep it you must tack it down with words. She had tried it and found that it worked on flowers rooms faces ceremonies.

No matter what they are in life, in memory they always seem to rearrange themselves in the opposite manner. All pleasures are seen as foreshortened and hasty and fleeting, and all pain lingering.

The Italian Futurist artist Giacomo Balla later called his daughters Luce and Elettricità in memory of what he saw at the Paris Exposition. (A third daughter was Elica—Propellor—after the modern machinery he also admired.)

La guerra no es una aberración, algo que es mejor olvidar lo antes posible.

War is not an aberration, best forgotten as quickly as possible.

If he's forgotten me, I'll make him remember me. I'll make him want me again.

Once, when she was six years old, she had fallen from a tree, flat on her stomach. She could still recall that sickening interval before breath came back into her body. Now, as she looked at him, she felt the same way she had felt then, breathless, stunned, nauseated.

The whole world can't lick us but we can lick ourselves by longing too hard for things we haven't got any more - and by remembering too much.

So I think I'll remove him from your mind forever, this way. I'll put my hands, so, on each side of your head and I'll smash your skull between them like a walnut and that will blot him out.

To die for ones country, is to live forever.

Dearest one, do you remember When we last did meet?

The whole world can't lick us but we can lick ourselves by longing too hard for things we haven't got any more—and by remembering too much.

And these children will never talk of anything else either. They'll think it was wonderful and glorious to fight the Yankees and come home blind and crippled—or not come home at all. They all like to remember the war, to talk about it. But I don't. I don't even like to think about it. I'd forget it all if I could—oh, if I only could!

She listened with flesh crawling as Melanie told tales of Tara, making Scarlett a heroine as she faced the invaders and saved Charles' sword, bragging how Scarlett had put out the fire. Scarlett took no pleasure or pride in the memory of these things. She did not want to think of them at all.

she could recall nothing about Charles except the dying-calf look on his face when she told him she would marry him.

Food! Food! Why did the stomach have a longer memory than the mind? Scarlett could banish heartbreak but not hunger and each morning as she lay half asleep, before memory brought back to her mind war and hunger, she curled drowsily expecting the sweet smells of bacon frying and rolls baking. And each morning she sniffed so hard to really smell the food she woke herself up.

It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute.

Wonderful invention, the phonograph. Keeps a man alive long after he's dead.

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

Database: the information you lose when your memory crashes.