Quotes About Memory

I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us further away.

I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory.

You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn't diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished.

If you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it.

photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories. As I held my childhood pictures in my hands, in the tenderness of my "remembering," I also knew that with each photograph I was forgetting.

some could name things in their environment, others could count or say the alphabet, still others could recite whole books, word for word, from memory. However, they rarely used their speech to communicate with others. The

Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.

Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

I do not remember my dreams of animals.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

No estimo res més, excepte l'ombra viatgera d'un núvol. El lent record dels dies que són passats per sempre.

And although Margarita lived in a world that predated Technicolor, she always dreamed of the boy in rich pastels.

Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.

Son, always tell the truth. Then you'll never have to remember what you said the last time.

Youll never get mixed up if you simply tell the truth. Then you dont have to remember what you have said, and you never forget what you have said.

I always think everything is going to last forever, but nothing ever does. In fact nothing exists longer than an instant except the thing that we hold in memory

I visited my father for the full ten years that he was in prison, so we already had a deep and loving relationship, and remembered our mother at those times.

Remembering this has a survival

Indeed, he was a contradiction. Ray Bradbury was a nostalgic visionary: He predicted the past and remembered the future.

Memory is most powerful when it is purposeful and selective. . . . [I]t requires that we possess stories and narratives that link facts in ways that are both meaningful and truthful, and provide a . . . way of knowing what facts are worth attending to. . . . We remember those things that fit a template of meaning, and point to a larger whole. We fail to retain the details that, like wandering orphans, have no connection to anything of abiding concern. . . . The design of our courses and

I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.

you don't have to be dead to haunt. Parents, songs, exes.

History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other.