Quotes About Memory

Maybe that's what happens with age, I thought. All your life you force yourself to forget people who have hurt you, but as you get older and weaker their memory surfaces again, like a bubble in the water. You have to surrender, because you feel to tired to fight it and push it down again. And maybe, unexpectedly, you find out that instead, of revamping your anger, those memories produce an unexpected sweetness.

I can't say why some memories float and other sink.

These were the moments that would stick in her memory for years to come, those instants of perfect bliss that nothing else would ever match again.

It may be possible to forget our past but our past is not going to forget us.

Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.

The past affects the present even without our being aware of it.

I bequeath my soul to God… My body to be buried obscurely. For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next age.

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.

The monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years, or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities have been decayed and demolished?

If you read a piece of text through twenty times, you will not learn it by heart so easily as if you read it ten times while attempting to recite from time to time and consulting the text when your memory fails.

I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory of the past events as the snail leaves its slime. Francis Bacon in conversation in Daniel Farson

It appears, then, that there are six lesser forms of aids to the memory; viz.: the cutting off of infinity; the reduction of the intellectual to the sensible; impression made on the mind in a state of strong emotion; impression made on the mind disengaged; multitude of points to take hold of; expectation beforehand.

But Catherine — or rather the Catherine of happy memory — had so much more. Even in her present invalid state, she enforced her hard, brilliant personality with a definiteness that reduced little Daphne to the pallor of a still-life pastel beside a strongly-coloured portrait in oils.

With hindsight we visualize memories of things, places, and events from the past. With foresight, we are also able to look forward in time—to use our imagination to envision a possible future. Imagination therefore enables us to have both a sense of history as well as a plan for the future. It establishes connections—visual bridges—between the past, present, and future.

Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is essential to the creation of a nation, which is why the advance of historical study often poses a threat to nationality.

Knowledge is an old error remembering its youth

Wisdom not only gets, but once got, retains.

No, no, not in the law, it ain't. Not in the end, I mean. When a man is dead, sense must be made of it; and it might as well be sense as serves the living, for it won't serve the dead, nohow.

First, the white ceiling. Then the slow realisation that this was not the dark, damp timber six inches above his nose to which he had woken for six weeks in his bunk aboard Henrietta. Then the memory of his purpose; and the whole variorum mosaic of the evening before; and a burning curiosity. The light through the gable window was full sunshine. He

Ci sono paesaggi, come certi istanti della vita, che non si possono cancellare mai dalla mente; tornano sempre ad attraversarci dal di dentro, con intensità ogni volta più forte. E volgere l'ultimo sguardo al mare fu uno di questi; avevamo voltato la testa per non perdere l'estrema visione di quella speranza e addentrarci definitivamente nella terra dell'oblio.

Maybe memory is overrated. Maybe forgetting is better. (Show me the Proust of forgetting, and I'll read him tomorrow.) Sometimes it's like juggling a hundred thousand crystal balls in the air at once, trying to keep all these memories going. Every time one falls to the floor and shatters into dust, another crevice cracks open inside me, through which another chunk of who we were disappears forever.

Los que no pueden recordar el pasado, están condenados a repetirlo…». ¿Quién

Somos lo que recordamos o lo que nos recuerda. No somos mucho más.

The faces you clutch at desperately slip away; it's when you're not thinking about them that their features flash past. It can happen on a street corner, at the turn of a staircase, because somebody said a word, because some image, an image has passed. Then the face is there for a split second, very fragile. One mustn't grasp at it, or it whisks away. One might as well try and catch a cloud. It was a cloud.