Quotes About Memory

the man used names like passwords, all of them with a brief life span. But this time the thief wished that he had owned the name earlier in his life. He spent the first day imagining moments from his past when he could have been 'Astolphe,' when he might have behaved and participated with more ease and subtlety just for having the epaulette of such a name.

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

Yes, forgetting can be a curse, especially as we age. But forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering. Think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn't quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember.

Memory is the enemy of wonder

forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.

Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.

The philosophical implications of predictive coding are deep and strange. The model suggests that our perceptions of the world offer us not a literal transcription of reality but rather a seamless illusion woven from both the data of our senses and the models in our memories.

What memoir of childhood doesn't at some point turn on the scent of a sweet pea or a freshly cut lawn or a boxwood hedge, to leap the fence of years?

Grof did extensive research trying to correlate his patients' recollections of their birth experience on LSD with contemporaneous reports from medical personnel and parents. He concluded that with the help of LSD many people can indeed recall the circumstances of their birth, especially when it was a difficult one.)

Our brains developed under the pressure of natural selection to make us good foragers, which is how humans have spent 99 percent of their time on Earth. The presence of flowers, as even I understood as a boy ,is a reliable predictor of future food. People who were drawn to flowers , and who further could distinguish among them and remember where in the landscape they'd seen them, would be much more successful foragers than people who were blind to their significance.

I worked on a film short with Frank Sinatra when I was a kid.

By the end of Pop's life I wanted to give something back and when I came on board as his musical director he needed me. I wasn't the greatest conductor of the orchestra, but I was hired to conduct Frank Sinatra. He was slowing down, his memory wasn't what it had been. But his audience never stopped loving him. He had teleprompters.

My mother was born in 1953, my brother was born in 1983, and I was born in 1993. Then, my Mum passed away on June 3 at 10:23 P.M. in 2013. Since then, I'd see threes everywhere.

During a performance of 'Blood Brothers' in 1990, I forgot to sing. I was so moved by what my co-star Kiki Dee was doing, that I completely missed my cue.

When you say, 'I'm going to sing it once, and everyone is going to hear it forever,' that's kind of frightening.

What's interesting is a lot of the older music when we start performing it, it acts a lot like muscle memory. It's kind of like riding a bike. For me as a singer, I just had to remember like what part of my face I sang that into.

The singer-songwriter has always played music that was stylistically rooted in the '30s and the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. But the fact of the matter is that none of us remember the Depression firsthand.

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

I have a phenomenal memory. I remember every single thing that anybody said to me, ever did to me, who was nice to me and who was not nice to me.

It's so easy to fetishise the dead. We rose-tint or villainise them, and so often in the retelling they are saints or sinners, rather than flawed humans muddling along like the rest of us.

I remember seeing the movie 'To Sir With Love' when I was a little girl.

I have always looked up to Rajesh Khanna sir's work. And when I think of biopics, his is the first name that comes to my mind.

I really don't remember my first meeting with Arif Sir.

Me and my sister made up a game called 'Milky Cow'. We were on holiday in France when I was 12, and there was a kid who had bovine features, and every time we went past her, we'd say, 'There's Milky Cow'.