Quotes About Memory

writing truly imprints the brain

Vivimos demasiado del recuerdo y demasiado poco de nuestra imaginación. Demasiado de lo que es o de lo que ya ha sido y demasiado poco de lo que podría ser.

I can change. I can live out of my imagination instead of my memory.

What's that thing when someone gets a knock on the head and suddenly can't remember anything about himself?' Death,' said the barman, his face a mask of disapproval.

Even as the fact of it becomes more overwhelming, more unbearable, some things are irrevocable, if not circumstantially then in the heart and memory, the heart and memory being the only two things that can puncture the flow of time through which hisses the history of the future.

There it was . . . a missing day that lay between the thirty-first of December 1999, and the first of January 2000.

L.A. . . . is the old America of legend and distant memory . . . the old America that invented itself all over from the ground up every single day.

By nature, memory is more monogamous than desire.

I am the moment in which explodes the Twentieth Century's great menage à trois between chaos and faith and memory.

A dream's only a memory of the future, right?

He closed her eyes and she slept. The people of the Crowd watched her, while somewhere else sailors read the memory of her face, the compass of mazes.

If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.

In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.

Conscious content now is known in the context of a consistent locus or point of view that can integrate that knowledge. Infantile amnesia begins to drop away. Events are held in memory in a verbal temporal order. A conscious person shows up—not as the object of reflection but as a perspective from which knowing can occur.

Parece que forma parte de la condición humana creer en nuestra capacidad de predicción… y también olvidar rápidamente lo malas que resultaron ser nuestras predicciones.

There's no way to really preserve a person when they've gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth, it's just a story. Stories are all we're ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles

There's nothing about the times when she wasn't funny or sexy, or when she talked too much or about her pissing or shitting. There's no way to really preserve a person when they're gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth, it's just a story.

I loved her, Eric. So much. And she died. I only get the general sense of things and they pass so quickly, like childhood smells touching you and then being gone on the breeze. But. But but but. It feels strange to be writing this down - I think I believed I could change what happened, undo it, prevent it, save her life somehow after she was already gone. Of course I couldn't. Dead is dead is dead.

Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory

Neurons that fire together wire together.

It's a trick, of course. That thing the neuro-crowd has been doing to music lately, the trigger buried in the rhythm. It fires up the amygdala, a dash of flight-or-flight to create hyper-salience, hippocampal overactivation for enhanced recall, more Big Brother kind of shit. "Direct-to-memory" is how they describe it. Singing in public was his experience.

Those highlight moments forever seared in your memory: that too is group flow in action.

The Greeks called that sudden understanding anamnesis. Literally, "the forgetting of the forgetting.

Or perhaps the truth was that there is no Fate, no pattern, nothing at all except a tired man looking back and forgetting everything but this and that detail which the very act of memory composes into a fate. Eschenburg, remembering his childhood, wondered whether Fate was merely a form of forgetfulness.