Quotes About Memory

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Where is the borderland between memory and hallucination?

Anxiety doesn't have a memory, remember? So believing she was going to learn from that mistake was just me falling into the trap of avoidance as well. She regretfully stayed home, and the safety she felt was stronger than her regret. The Worry Monster just flexed his muscle that much more.

He has several tactics he uses most often in his attacks on her mind: exaggerated likelihood, catastrophic thinking, underestimated ability, faulty memory, and perpetual questions. Worry has no memory and assumes the worst

past is like a histroy book were we can learn what weve done in it.

How could you forget something you never learned or had?!

again. The disturbing influence of that one incident lasted

Only masochists can get along without editing their own memories.

How curious it was to find that apparently nothing was ever really forgotten, that the past was never really gone, that it was always lurking, ready to destroy the present, or at least to make the present seem absurd.

I'm a summer baby, so I usually have my birthday as a good summer memory.

Nous sommes de la poussière d'étoile ... Nous sommes la mémoire du monde.

Well, memory can play tricks. Most people, I think, tend to remember the good rather than the bad when someone close to them dies.

The first step in the acquisition of wisdom is silence, the second listening, the third memory, the fourth practice, the fifth teaching others.

this book is really interesting(especially for holocaust lovers)

i gather up each sound you left behind and stretch them on our bed. each nite i breathe you and become high.

you, man, will you remember me when i die? will you stare and stain my death and say i saw her dancen among swallows far from the world's obscenities? you, man, will you remember and cry?

The golden moment when I'm not yet awake enough to remember that there are things I would rather forget.

Not that you are unloved but that you love and must decide which to remember; tracks left in the field, a language of going away or coming back— and to look up from the single mind, to let untangle the far-off snow from sky until no longer held as proof is also where birds find agreement strung along branches each with their own song for the other, every note used to sing anyway— how to hold the already as the not yet

nostalgic people yearn for the past for a good reason---because they missed it, they weren't fully there when they should have been, when it was the present.

I left my scarf behind. You sent it on. I meant to buy and send a Thank You card But I forgot, and soon the year was gone And the year after that. My life was hard