Quotes About Memory

Any tragic memory I have I also think is really funny. On any given day, I can think about how horrible something is and also how ridiculous and over-the-top it is.

I was talking on the phone in my trailer, and I looked in the mirror and I saw the badge clipped to my belt, a gun with a holster, and the suit and the tie with the jacket off, and it was just deja vu. I remember that image so clearly from growing up. My dad would come home for lunch, take off his jacket, have the gun and the badge.

As an exercise, I devoted an afternoon to writing my memories of childhood. I remembered our family's arrival at a single-wide trailer on an Ozark meadow and my mother's shock at learning that this would be our new home.

Before movies, memory unspooled differently in the mind, trailing off in dust-blasted fade-out rather than spliced-together flashback; before photography, memory rippled like a reflection on water's surface, less precise but more profoundly true.

No memory is ever alone; it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.

Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.

Very few of the men whose names have become great in the early pioneering of jazz and of swing were trained in music at all. They were born musicians: they felt their music and played by ear and memory. That was the way it was with the great Dixieland Five.

Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.

Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.

No matter how thoroughly a person may have learned the Greek alphabet, he will never be in a condition to repeat it backwards without further training.

There's all that brain work involved, remembering all those lines in a script. I find I have to eat a lot of fish, late - but not too late - in the afternoon. Doing theatre, you need to be like an athlete in training.

I watch action movies, and you don't remember when Jason Statham does a kick or punch. It's character trait stuff you remember.

Sometimes I get off stage, and I almost have no recollection of what happened. It's almost like a trance; it's very bizarre.

Now I'm writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.

Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn't serve anyone, and it's painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you're magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person.

We transform the world, but we don't remember it. We adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don't recall what was there.

'The Act of Killing' helped catalyze this basic transformation in how the media talks about the past.

Memory is a code to who we are, a collection of not just dates and facts but also of epic emotional struggles, epiphanies, transformations.

I'm still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me.

I remember somebody came in with Chicago Transit Authority, and we listened to it one time.

I'm old enough to remember Bush v. Gore, and the transition there didn't start until mid-December, and yet it got done.

We do some experiments in humans, some in mice, and there are some questions that can only be answered in nonhuman primates. It's true that you can't immediately say that those experiments will translate into human health, but nevertheless, it is obvious that having an understanding of human memory is going to be important for human health.

Doing processing locally has its advantages. For instance, the cost of an endpoint CPU and memory is a 1000x cheaper than the cost of CPU and memory in the server. And in many places around the world, connectivity and transmission costs are sometimes far more expensive than the device.

When I write about things, it's a lot to do with sense memory. How things smell and taste can bring incredible memories flooding back and transport you in an instant to another time and place.