Quotes About Memory

Anything you cannot communicate without reading will be forgotten instantly.

The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.

Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory.

Inasmuch as art preserves, with the promise of happiness, the memory of the goal that failed, it can enter, as a 'regulative idea,' the desperate struggle for changing the world. Against all fetishism of the productive forces, against the continued enslavement of individuals by the objective conditions (which remain those of domination), art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the individual.

He entered the city asked a blind man if he had ever heard the name Enkidu, and the old man shrugged and shook his head, then turned away, as if to say, 'It is impossible to keep the names of friends whom we have lost

It could go on for years and years, And has, for centuries, For being human holds a special grief Of privacy within the universe That yearns and waits to be retouched By someone who can take away The memory of death.

It is that inner atmosphere that has An unfamiliar gravity or none at all Where words are flung out in the air but stay Motionless without an answer, Hovering about one's lips Or arguing back to haunt The memory with what one failed to say, Until one learns acceptance of the silence Amidst the new debris Or turns again to grief As the only source of privacy, Alone with someone loved.

As when we can recall so vividly We almost touch, Or think of all the gestures that we failed To make.

We elms of Malvern Hill Remember every thing; But sap the twig will fill: Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring.

Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs

But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright son has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves. Because they have no memory . . . because they are not human.

In glades they meet skull after skull/Where pine-cones lay--the rusted gun,/Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat/And cuddled-up skeleton;/And scores of such. Some start as in dreams,/And comrades lost bemoan:/By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged--/But the Year and the Man were gone. (The Armies of the Wilderness)

The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights.

Man and boy, I have lived ever since I can remember.

People can remember their childhood, but events from four or five years ago are in a never-never land.

Look at me, I'm getting defensive about something that happened so many years ago, somebody said. I'll have to find out who that was and if he's still alive.

I'm not into watching stuff I did last week, let alone three or four years ago.

It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri.

I remember way back when I was young, 10 years ago.

I lived in Paris when I was 20 and 21, and actually knew people that worked for the government there, that talked about terrorism in the country 20 years ago.

The only danger about websites, you know, is people who remember something you did or said thirty or forty years ago, and bring it up against you, so you're going for a job and you don't get it.

I tend to believe that film can try to save what still can be saved, in terms of our histories, our memories. Because a lot of things are disappearing very quickly, things are changing. We are living in very quick times, and we have a new generation who basically know nothing about events 30 years ago.

It's my memory, and what happened between that moment 10 or 15 years ago and now, there's a lot of gray area.

Today 23 years ago dear Grandmama died. I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour Government.