Quotes About Memory

You forget the things you want to remember and remember the things you want to forget.

Now death was a place, a place to which people disappeared forever when they died, a place that gradually sucked away the clarity of memory afterward for a similar one-way journey.

He told me, in case I shared the common notion that the old deserved death, it was hardly ever true. He had seen and heard a man recite verbatim five Damon Runyan stories, with beautiful gestures, and be cold dead in thirty minutes.

The mind is a miser," he said. "Nothing is ever thrown away, and it's amazing what you can find if you dig deep enough.

To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one's own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.

Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget.

I usually tug my helmet's brim once, then push it back up into position, but I'm not wearing a helmet. I'm embarrassed to find myself miming the action through sheer muscle memory.

I know it doesn't matter what I've promised because I will not live to have the conversation in the first place. I'm so good at pretending. I'm a liar. I've lied to everyone. To every person in my life, to everyone I know. I've never told the truth. I've lied to them all. [...] Everyone keeps saying that if I could remember, it would help. That's what they've said all along. And the thing is this: I remember doing it. I remember every single bit of it.

I'm beneath notice. As it should be. [...] then I'm gone as if I've never been here. And soon, it will be as though I never were. I am going to join Lola in the memory hole. It is my proper place. It is where I deserve to be consigned. [...] Once she forgets me, maybe then she can remember. And that, more than anything, will count as me doing something productive.

A significant event in your life, and what you would or would not change about it. A significant event in your life. And what you would. Or would not. Change about it." Are you fucking kidding me? How about: not pulled the fucking trigger?

I have no reason not to believe any of the things I've been told. I'm told so many things. I was a child. It was an accident. It wasn't my fault. I'm told. I was four years old.

Another year down. Ten years. No one said anything. No one ever says anything. Nothing online. Nothing in the Sunday edition of the "Lowe County times"--"the Loco"--that Mom still has delivered every week. Memory holes are efficient.

My hand throbs with leftover pain. I hit something. Something. Not someone. The flat of my palm, smacking against Ms. Benitez's desk. Now I remember. Her stapler jumped. So did she. "Don't talk about my sister." I blacked out. Went into a fugue state. Sank deep into the static, where sound and light and memory could not find me.

Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended. This "peak-end" rule of Kahneman's is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves of how the experience felt.

The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever...

It is always through arbitrary combinations that experience enslaves the memory.

You: Why did you pick my first name? Your dad: I don't remember. You: I see. Can you give me an example of something else you can't remember? Your dad: Uh . . . what? You: Did you like the sound of my name? Your dad: Yes. Your name rhymes with platypus, and that has always been one of our favorite animals.

Want to know the biggest lie ever written? 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

My mother says I should be nice to everyone. Either school was different when she was young or she just doesn't remember.

God is the one who always remembers those whom history has forgotten.

I found myself compelled to fight back from my eyes the tears, and quanch my heart trobling to my throat to not weep before him. But Sacco's name will live in the hearts of the people when your name, your laws, institutions and your false god are but a dim rememoring of a cursed past in which man was wolf to the man.

En la reminiscencia, en efecto, el alma tiene el pensamiento de esta sensación, pero no en la continuidad de su duración. Así, la idea de la sensación no es la duración misma de la sensación, es decir, ella no es propiamente su memoria. En cuanto a saber si las ideas mismas están sujetas a alguna corrupción, lo veremos en la Filosofía.

Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone,its tremulous thread spun in the hurricanespider floss on my cheek; light from the zenithspun when the slowworm lay in her lapfifty years ago.

It is easier to die than to remember.