Quotes About Memory

The Egyptian contribution to architecture was more concerned with remembering the dead than the living.

It's from George Santayana, a Spanish-American philosopher from the first part of the twentieth century. He also famously said that history is a pack of lies about events that never happened, told by people who weren't there.

The saying is actually 'Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'

We all become history at some point or another, right?

Putting it in the spank bank for later.

Now you're the adult who doesn't believe this is really happening. And, what always happens to that adult? Do you still remember, or do you forget all the true things when you grow up, Peter Pan?

And none of Grandpa's stories were ever lies. I know that now. They were just true in a different way. He had

Words are worms, can live in your head for years if you let them in.

When we use a measuring tape, we are using a system of numbers that is human invented. What are the birds using? And further, how are they storing it in memory? To be stored in memory the measurements have to be encoded in some form and that form has to have an internal consistency to it. In other words it has to possess the same kind of structural integrity as our system of mathematical measurement.

He said brains are needed to recall memories, but it appears brains are not where memories are stored.

As I said, the good die young, and the motherfuckers go on forever, pardon my French.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

[Fall] hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die—migrate or die.

Are you still forgetting things?" "I don't know, I can't remember," I said.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

Our sense of history has grown dangerously thin, and our sense of proportion with it.

People seem to remember the sacrifices they made more than what the sacrifices were for.

The average person remembers a dream only once or twice a week. Given the fact that we all dream every night, that leaves at least ninety-five percent of most dreams forgotten

While most of what you think of as memory involves retrieving information from the past, prospective memory, or memory for intentions, refers to our ability to remember our intention to carry out some specific action at a future time or circumstance.

we do this by forming a mental connection between what we want to remember to do and the future circumstances in which we intend to do it.

The verbalization that I use myself to organize my intended effort is, "next time I'm dreaming I want to remember to recognize I'm dreaming." The "when" and the "what" of the intended action must be clearly specified.

try to let your first thought upon awakening be, "What was I just dreaming?" Before attempting to write down the dream, go over the dream in your mind, retelling the dream story to yourself until you remember it as a whole.

The faintest waft is sometimes enough to induce feelings of hunger or anticipation, or to transport you back through time and space to a long-forgotten moment in your childhood. It can overwhelm you in an instant or simply tease you, creeping into your consciousness slowly and evaporating almost the moment it is detected.