Quotes About Memory

Our olfactory bulbs have gathered endless sense patterns of foods high in sugar, fat and salt. These flavour memories have become part of the fabric of our sense of self and are not easily discarded, because the system, as we have seen, is designed 'not to forget'.

Our sense of taste is something that anchors us to the person we have always known ourselves to be.

Memory is the single most powerful driving force in how we learn to eat; it shapes all our yearnings.

When we talk of memory of food, we generally assume that nostalgia is a phenomenon that occurs late in life - like Proust being transported to his youth by a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea. But food memory is there from the start. Even babies have nostalgia!

We are all born with echoes of our mother's diet, which means that no one is a totally blank slate when it comes to flavour.

Already, by thirteen weeks, the taste buds are mature. A thirteen-week-old foetus weighs maybe an ounce, with no fat under the skin, no air in the lungs. Yet already they can not only swallow but taste, and these sips of fluid leave memories.

Flavour is not actually in food, any more than redness is in a rose or yellow in the sun. It is a fabrication of our brains and for each taste we create a mental 'flavour image', in the same way that we develop a memory bank of the faces of people we know. The difference is that whereas faces fade when you haven't seen them in a while, flavours and smells have a way of lodging themselves in indelibly.

What you taste as a child is still there in your adult brain, even if you haven't thought of it for years.

Every bite is a memory and the most powerful memories are the first ones.

When the flavour of white bread and processed meat are linked in your memory with the warmth and authority of a parent and the camaraderie of siblings, it can feel like a betrayal to stop eating them.

To eat these foods again in the new country was a way of holding on to the grandmothers and mothers who had first cooked with them. Often, however, the remembering through food is bittersweet, because even when you have tracked down every last herb and spice, the missing ingredient is the cook. You find you don't want pasta 'just like Mama used to make'; you actually want Mama herself.

Unlike traditional food, which is remembered jointly within families or communities, mass-produced food and drink is remembered across continents.

The flavour of sweet milk is perhaps the most firmly imprinted of all food memories in Western culture.

Flavour has a remarkable ability to imprint itself on our memories and therefore to drive our future food choices.

Anything eaten just before a bout of stomach bug may be hated for life.

Often, however, the remembering through food is bittersweet, because even when you have tracked down every last herb and spice, the missing ingredient is the cook. You find you don't want pasta "just like mama used to make"; you actually want mama herself.

The great men of earth are the shadowy men, who, having lived and died, now live again and forever through their undying thoughts.

Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.

Home should be an oratorio of the memory, singing to all our after life melodies and harmonies of old remembered joy.

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.

The legitimacy of the government depends on the continuous exercise of an act of forgetting.

Your fingers smell of incense—a lover sings to the corpse of his dead sweetheart.

I haven't seen her since. I wrote to her a few times, not really expecting an answer, for—as she often used to say—the tongue is longer than the pen and can lead you straight to Kiev.

I shoulder my pack and hit the trail, realizing I'm being called to a memory deeper than my own, to a language my body has known all along. The desert speaks- out of lifetimes of patience and pain-with a subtle but insistent voice. My role in the Great Conversation isn't finally to understand, only to listen and love.