Quotes About Memory

And in the final reckoning, American lives lost in the Civil War exceed the total of those lost in all the other wars the country has fought added together, world wars included.

The custodians of that memory won their postwar battle to celebrate the South's Lost Cause as a valiant crusade for constitutional liberties and state's rights that was overwhelmed only by brute force.

Grief is only the memory of widowed affections.

Whenever addressed by her saint's name, she seemed to feel starched shifts, icy douches, and furtive subcellar scents threatening all over again—memory's imperishable dues.

People find different ways of keeping the ones they loved among the living, he said cautiously. Children. Memories. The names of things.

the girl.. her name was Shelly...

I cannot forget that I have forgotten. I may have used the veil so successfully that I have made my performance believable to myself.

There are silences that can be heard, even from the dead and from the severely oppressed. Much is recoverable from an apparently forgotten past. Sensitive and faithful historians can learn much of what has been lost, and much therefore that can be continued.

The power of citizens in a society is determined by their ranking in games that have been played. A society preserves its memory of past winners. Its record-keeping functions are crucial to societal order. Large bureaucracies grow out of the need to verify the numerous entitlements of the citizens of that society.

Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance.

Formal schooling tends to demand that humans use their memories the way computers do, rather than the way humans do. This, too, can make people seem stupid.

The last human of importance the American people have been able to keep in the working end of their brain is your own Chicago triggerman, Dillinger. After him they kind of lost hold on keeping who's who straight. So don't be surprised if they don't remember who Cabot Wright is, or if they do.

Though now, of all that could have been, there is nothing.

Morgan's studies show that the use of the SERE simulated torture techniques impairs memory and prompts inaccurate answers from those subjected to the tactics. Mitchell and Jessen's methods, Morgan said, create a mental state that makes it difficult to remember information accurately—making the credibility of all statements suspect.

Human memories were organized in the hippocampus region, but recent research suggested the information was only stored there on a short-term basis. Later, the hippocampus recoded these memories as electrical patterns across billions of synapses and distributed them for long-term storage over the entire cerebral cortex.

If you don't talk about it, it didn't happen.

We'll get security when people decide it's important enough. They say it's important, but the evidence is people don't think it's important enough to pay for. If it's important enough, vendors will pay attention to it. It doesn't matter what people say if they're not willing to spend extra for it, cash and cycles and memory and things like that.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.

memory will cut you off at the knees if you let it.

All stories are ghost stories, about things lost, people, memories, home, passion, youth, about things struggling to be seen, to be accepted by the living.

Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it's the same with people.

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.