Quotes About Memory

I suppose that's all a man can hope for during his lifetime,' nodded Horus, 'to set an example, and when he is dead, to be an inspiration for history

No man lives forever and even as memory fades, so too will any remembrance of him.

Not all of it was done by soldiers, or by men. She'd shut her eyes and run her fingers over Jack's shoulders, down his spine, as a blind person might seek to recognise the shape of something. The shape—the ache in her own flesh—of her love for him.

His mother is dead, yet she has never not been, in theory, at his shoulder. He wants her not to have known and suffered or even witnessed all the things that followed her death. Including all this now. But that would be like wishing her dead. Merely dead.

And though, indeed, it only happened once, it's gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there's a memory for them to happen in …

It tasted as beer had always tasted the few times she'd drunk it, like brown autumn leaves.

And, like a mother to herself, she would never forget that girl on a bicycle, though she would never mention her to anyone, never breathe a word.

Party leaders again have always to remember that the organisation which they control is an entity with an existence in the memory and emotions of the electors, independent of their own opinions and actions.

But where in all of this description is the essential chair? Have we yet come even close to a full description of it? Did we even mention that several hundred years ago, it wasn't a chair but a tree? Where is it now? Here? Or in memory. We cannot even fully describe a chair and yet we say I am. I am.... Understand. There is no I am. Nothing is . Try to describe all that you are. Simultaneously discern the logical flaw in what I've just said. Now! Feel the white flame.

All that I was, but for reflections in a cracked mirror, has been lost for a long, long time.

almost every living cell there was already a functioning computer with a huge memory? A mammalian cell had a DNA complement of several billion base pairs, each acting as a piece of information. What was reproduction, after all, but a computerized biological process of enormous complexity and reliability?

Memory is stored in neurons—interactive memory, carried in charge and potential, then downloaded to chemical storage in cells, then downloaded to molecular level. Stored in introns of individual cells.

They are Russians. You do not remember them in Berlin. I do. I was just a boy, but I remember them—strong, sentimental, cruel, crafty and stupid at once.

We shouldn't cross this place," I said. "A bad, sad place. It doesn't know it's dead.

I Saw Eternity the other night, he quoted, and not remembering the rest, concluded aloud with, "And it gave me quite a fright …

You see, it's the slow knife…the knife that takes its time, the knife that waits years without forgetting, then slips between the bones. That's the knife—" With her other hand, she armed the trigger device. "—that cuts deepest.

There is nothing so momentary as a sporting achievement, and nothing so lasting as the memory of it.

If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.

The past is never dead. It's not even past; if it were there would be no grief or sorrow.

For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. —Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

The thing about kicking open a door to the past is that sometimes what's behind it comes out under its own power.

The female memory defies explanation.

The images I'd most like to wipe away cling to life with the tenacity of weeds, while those I want to treasure fade like the blush on a rose.

Because death is the end, and if a man doesn't speak before it silences him, then the things he holds closest die with him.