Quotes About Memory

Negative emotions often make things even more memorable than positive ones because recalling things that are threatening—and avoiding those situations in the future if possible—is often critical to survival.

We make memories, but memories make us, too…

It gave me a sudden chill to recognize what it was like without wireless technology that I can't even remember what it was like without it. One day you're a Flintstone, the next a Jetson. As we grow older we're always complaining about how fast time goes, but this made me feel as though I'd raced through the last eighteen years without noticing them.

I had never seen a prison, nor had I even imagined one, but there is a racial memory in man that instinctively knows of these things. The architecture of misery has an unmistakable look and feel about it.

He is already an important part of my story.

Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything to the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past.

So familiar that it didn't even register in the conversation; but it did reappear when I laid it out on the table of my dreams.

The wounds inflicted by weapons may close in time; scalds may heal gradually; but wounds inflicted by words remain painful as long as one lives.

SEEING THE WORLD "In the fifties, when my mother began lobbying for a trip to Europe, my father, who had been brought to Missouri from the Ukraine when he was two, said, 'I been.' 

It is his absence that is part of me and has been for years. This is who I am, perhaps who we all are, keepers of the absent and the dead. It is the blessing and burden of being alive.

Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.

She asked me if Christmas was a particularly tense time and whether my father had ever hit my mother while trimming the tree. I couldn't remember anything like that happening, and although it seemed possible, I was suspicious when she asked me if my father had ever thrust the silver star at my mother to deliberately pierce her hand. I said no and she said the bastard and we both looked a little confused. (p. 9)

His heart definitely had a longer memory than his mind.

His wrinkled face showed the changes he had seen.

He lives in his memories

Memory is just an alternate version of reality.

Remember what happened last time with the 'cuda.

Why does it seem I won't come back here? Why speak of it as of, already, a place I miss?

If I remember it, did it happen?

until the image itself has grown distorted past all recognition save that of memory

I'd remember the way everyone else does: later, when none of it matters, memory as good as a mirror for changing things, no good at all

When a poacher kills an elephant, he doesn't just kill the elephant who dies. The family may lose the crucial memory of their elder matriarch, who knew where to travel during the very toughest years of drought to reach the food and water that would allow them to continue living. Thus one bullet may, years later, bring more deaths.

This litany of loss […] is the profile of a species going extinct. In a generation or two the memory of wild Africa will be lost as utterly as an American prairie of head high wild flowers swirled by bison, darkened by wild pigeons, bordered by towering forests of chestnuts, as it all was mere moments ago.

A researcher once played a recording of an elephant who had died. The sound emanated from a speaker hidden in the thicket. The family went wild calling, looking all around. The dead's elephant daughter called for days afterword. The researchers never again did such a thing.