Quotes About Memory

Where were you when the world stopped turning

Anyone know how USB drives work?

That photo was taken in Bialystok, Poland, sometime around 1725.

Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.

Things happened, as soon as they had they were in the past, once they were, there was nothing you could do. Days and nights followed in a seamless phantasmagoria of action and inaction, of weariness, privation, duty, routine and waiting, always so much waiting. What had happened yesterday might have been in another life, as remote from today as the unknowable events of tomorrow.

when I slip into the past, I become it.

I have a very clear memory of my first encounter with myth, sitting in a mobile library and travelling, at the same time, with Theseus on the road to Athens. By the time we'd met, and disposed of, the pine-bending giant Sinis, I'd become completely entranced. Within a few months I'd read every book on myths, legends and folklore in our two nearest libraries.

The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.

For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.

But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?

Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant…

You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.

Remember, remember the fifth of November of gunpowder treason and plot. I know of no reason why the gun powder treason should ever be forgot.

The daguerreotype reproduces what appeared before a lens at a particular moment and never again-its appearance is simultaneous with its disappearance, its death.

Reading American photographs is also a way of reading the past-not just the scenes recorded and the faces immobilized into permanent images, but the past as culture, as ways of thinking and feeling, as experience

Solange's infant did not survive beyond the first week of life. She was lowered into the ground on March 7, bearing the name Jeanne-Gabrielle.

it's a sad world we live in when a human being leaves so little of a mark that no one even realizes it when he's gone.

People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people

Readers develop unique histories with the books they read. It may not be immediately apparent at the time of reading, but the person you were when you read the book, the place you were where you read the book, your state of mind while you read it, your personal situation (happy, frustrated, depressed, bored) and so on – all these factors, and others, make the simple experience of reading a book a far more complex and multi-layered affair than might be thought.

What satisfaction do you, personally, get from being a writer?" Lanark tried to remember. He said, "It's the only disciplined work I remember trying. I sleep better for it.

Place is the fabric of our lives, memory and identity are stitched through it. Without having somewhere of one's own, a place that is home, freedom is an empty word.

May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother, about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff, shrinks would say. I was eight, and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast.

Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.

History is what we write, not what we remember. Why should we tarnish the memory of our planet by enshrining our less then noble deeds?