Quotes About Memory

Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.

We've outsourced our memories to digital devices, and the result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small forgotten thing as evidence that they're failing us.

Our subjective experience of time is highly variable. We all know that days can pass like weeks and months can feel like years, and that the opposite can be just as true: A month or year can zoom by in what feels like no time at all.

Tell me all the things I'm going to forget." "With every person it's different." "Will I forget to love you?" "I hope not." "Don't let me forget to love you.

Someone's past was happy in their shadow.

This ending of this love, while short, is like a paper cut. You get so caught up in the story that you are uncovering that you fail to see the edge begin to bite. It cuts deep and it stings no better than the last time but in a week or two, you will forget that it even happened;

I suddenly remembered that I could not swim.

history is not what happened in the past, but the best story we can tell with the available material

I remember, in former East Berlin, how startling it was to see the wall cut some streets. The street would go straight into the wall. It would continue on the other side, in another world. At least one street should have remained like that, walled, to remind people of the old division.

Would he be haunted, as she knew she would be, by the memory of the love they'd once clung to, yet tented to so recklessly, and abandoned so carelessly?

What were they wearing the last time you saw them?' Donna stared into the golden-flecked eyes of the moon-faced police lieutenant. He was a short man, intensely muscular

My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering.

Life is so short," I said sighing, "the past so long. Shouldn't we turn the page and move on?" "The past is the future," Aunt Emily shot back

Don't deny the past. Remember everything. If you're bitter, be bitter. Cry it out! Scream! Denial is gangrene.

some memories, too, might better be forgotten. didn't Obasan once say, "it is better to forget"? what purpose is served by hauling forth the jar of inedible food? if it is not seen, it does not horrify. what is past recall is past pain.

People go, you know. It's only you that remains. That's the way it will be. That's certain at least. It takes years to learn to be still.

The girl is twenty-five. It has not been very long since her divorce but she cannot remember the man who used to be her husband. He was probably nice. She will tell the child this, at any rate.

Memory is the resurrection. The dead move among us the living in our memory and that is the resurrection.

He had dreamed, he had dreamed...it left him.

Amnesia: The condition that enables a woman who has gone through labor to have sex again.

If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

Through writing, I have been looking back ever since, trying to recapture all that was left behind

I regret now that I didn't listen to their stories more closely, for they were yarn spinners, too.