Quotes About Memory

When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine — like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.

And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back and they won't be false, and they won't be true but they'll be real

I would like people to remember of me, how inexhaustible was her mindfulness.

I don't want to lose a single thread from the intricate brocade of this happiness .I want to remember everything.

I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore! Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child's voice—I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating—its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning -- it'll be gone. [ Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver ( O Magazine , March 2011)]

I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore! Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child's voice—I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating—its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.

What is your heart doing now? Remembering. Remembering!

The question is, what will it be like after the last day? Will I float into the sky or will I fray within the earth or a river— remembering nothing? How desperate I would be if I couldn't remember the sun rising, if I couldn't remember trees, rivers; if I couldn't even remember, beloved, your beloved name.

One or two things are all you need to travel over the blue pond, over the deep roughage of the trees and through the stiff flowers of lightning --- some deep memory of pleasure, some cutting knowledge of pain. 6 But to lift the hoof! For that you need an idea. 7 For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind. Don't love your life too much, it said, and vanished into the world.

Memory: a golden bowl, or a basement without light. For which reason the nightmare comes with its painful story and says: you need to know this. Some memories I would give anything to forget. Others I would not give up upon the point of death, they are the bright hawks of my life.

there's a sickness worse than the risk of death and that's forgetting what we should never forget.

I have not written here out of imagination and invention, but out of meditation and memoy. No doubt my memory has the usual partiality of the individual, and is not entirely trustworthy. Still, I have been loyal here to the experiences of my own life and not, as is required in the more designed arts, to the needs of the line or the paragraph.

How often now I just sit, with my elbows on the desk and my hands holding my face bold and upright, and stare into the past.

Even at a distance, Jack thought the commander-in-chief looked familiar, very familiar. But he couldn't figure out

exactly what it was like.

Lucy's gift," she said. The watch had stopped. The hands were at 2:20.

The other way to train medics is to have them practice a skill so many times that it becomes automatic. So when the prefrontal cortex goes AWOL, when reasoning drops away, muscle memory, one hopes, will persist.

One's own dead are more than cadavers, they are place holders for the living. They are a focus, a receptacle, for emotions that no longer have one.

After six months, you forget how heavy things are. Like, yourself." You also, after months of weightlessness, forget how to use your legs. "Your muscles don't remember what to do." And astronauts have no pit crew to rush

As a feature of the common man's funeral, the open casket is a relatively recent development: around 150 years. According to Mack, it serves several purposes, aside from providing what undertakers call "the memory picture." It reassures the family that, one, their loved one is unequivocally dead and not about to be buried alive, and, two, that the body in the casket is indeed their loved one, and not the stiff from the container beside his.

And finally, my gratitude to UM 006, H, Mr. Blank, Ben, the big guy in the sweatpants, and the owners of the forty heads. You are dead, but you're not forgotten.

Oh! Stars and clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me; if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart, and leave me in darkness.

It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being...