Quotes About Memory

God planted the seeds of all the trees," continued Hetty, after a moment's pause, "and you see to what a height and shade they have grown! So it is with the Bible. You may read a verse this year, and forget it, and it will come back to you a year hence, when you least expect to remember it.

I try not to live in the past. But sometimes the past lives in me.

When we think of our lives as what we have done, memory becomes a museum with one long shelf on which we arrange a bric-a-brac of deeds, each to his own liking.

Each year the snow tries to memorize, blindly, the landscape, as if it were the landscape that was going to melt in spring.

Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.

With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow. Ants deploy their pheromones, trails of chemical information; Theseus unwound Ariadne's thread. Now people leave paper trails.

Chance I is completely impersonal; you can't influence it. Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore. Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations. Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors.

When I am old, I hope to remember sadness unequivocally.

Those who have lost an infant are never, in a way, without an infant.

Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.

Our dreams recover what the world forgets.

It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence," wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, "We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.

What a host of little incidents, all deep-buried in the past -- problems that had once been urgent, arguments that had once been keen, anecdotes that were funny only because one remembered the fun. Did any emotion really matter when the last trace of it had vanished from human memory; and if that were so, what a crowd of emotions clung to him as to their last home before annihilation? He must be kind to them, must treasure them in his mind before their long sleep.

Brookfield will never forget his lovableness," said Cartwright, in a speech to the School. Which was absurd, because all things are forgotten in the end.

For Chips, like some old sea captain, still measured time by the signals of the past. . . .

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." - Maya Angelou

Writing it down is the way I make it real, the way I find my way into what it is I feel. The words on paper or computer screen tell me more than what I knew before I wrote them, help me remember what I'm afraid I'll forget, let me keep what I don't want to lose, say to me: You were here.

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.

I have no past--the steps have disappeared the wind has blown them away.

I believe every...man remembers the girl he thinks he should have married. She reappears to him in his lonely moments, or he sees her in the face of a young girl in the park, buying a snowball under an oak tree by the baseball diamond. But she belongs to back there, to somebody else, and that thought sometimes rends your heart in a way that you never share with anyone else.

I just saw a squirrel I used to know, but I'm not sure he recognized me. Last line of 'Season of the Witch

Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action.

Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.

God gave us memory that we might have roses in December.