Quotes About Memory

Somewhere it must all be recorded, as insects are captured in amber--that day on the river: transcribed in Brûlée's water, written on the autumn air, safe at least in my memory.

My mother had told me that seeds carry in their "memory" the whole complex pattern of stem and leaf and flower and fruit, and she had shown me how the stamens and pistils begin the seed-making process all over again.

The record is not simply a storage device. Its value resides in the particular set of memories and emotional associations held by its owner. These are inseparable from the physical object, which is no longer a physical object but an article of faith.

It's been my experience, Langford, that the past always has a way of returning. Those who don't learn, or can't remember it, are doomed to repeat it.

a dream is only a memory of the future

When the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the collision of time and memory, called history, the dreams began to come.

It's not nearly far enough if you've already become famous for something you want to forget forever.

He was scared. I could see that as clearly as I could see his face. This gun in his hand, it was supposed to take the fear away, to make him the master of this whole situation. But it was doing exactly the opposite. It was making him so scared he could barely think straight. This was an instant lesson for me, even at nine years old. It was something I'd remember forever.

Of course, it's a little late for a heart to heart when one of the hearts is half a cup of ash.

The last thing you will always remember is the most important one. A long time ago I told you I did not know for a fact yet that you were somebody special. Now I do. I love you Bucko.

It only takes a split second to smile and forget, yet to someone that needed it, it can last a lifetime.

How is it possible to miss a woman whom you kept at a distance, so that when she was gone you would not miss her?

Believe and nothing there is you cannot do, even disadvantaged as a woman. For Babylon I built, that was the city of the world, and never was there like it. Its fame is older far than any other, and more, its fame, it will survive far longer than the others too. And this is mine, and while its memory lives, so I live on immortal too.

It's the tension we feel between the desire to erase and forget and the need to always remember, and that only happens after you know, never before.

Childhood disappears down a storm drain. It flows, then trickles, then vanishes, leaving some olfactory memory—of new tennis balls, Sunday-morning bacon, a chemical cloud of Glade—to prove it ever existed. It seldom ends on a sixteenth birthday or an eighteenth birthday or some other calendar date, and rarer still is it stamped with a time of death. But sometimes it is.

Your story is the greatest legacy that you will leave to your friends.It's the longest-lasting legacy you will leave to your heirs.

Worst of all was the flight software that handled data on board the rover, writing to and reading from the "flash" memory that was our equivalent of a computer's hard drive. The read and write commands too often just didn't work. The command we seemed to use the most was the one the Flight Software team called "SHUTDOWN_DAMMIT", which was like hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL on a personal computer, killing everything off and starting over.

The closest I had ever come to seeing human nakedness before was in a movie. A documentary. It showed hundreds and hundreds of naked Jews, men, women, and children, being escorted by armed Nazi guards and barking German shepherds to their deaths. All the Jews were naked. Not undressed. Naked. And it seemed to me then, while I watched that documentary, that it wasn't just the Jews that the Nazis wanted annihilated but the very concept of nakedness as well.

The arts can sharpen the vision, quicken the intellect, preserve the memory, activate the conscience, enhance the understanding and refresh the language.

Things live on a whole lot longer when they are living in story and memory." "Okay,

Forgive me if I am repeating myself but time travelling will do that to a fellow.

In our memories, there is a graveyard where we bury our dead. They all lie there together, the loved ones and the ones we hated, friends and foes and kin, with no distinction among them. We have to mourn every one of them, because our memories have made them as much a part of us as our bones or our skin. If we don't, we've no right to remember anything at all.

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these. —Susan B. Anthony

Name none of the fallen, for they stand in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living.