Quotes About Memory

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

When you die, others who think they know you, will concoct things about you... Better pick up a pen and write it yourself, for you know yourself best.

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

Whether it's my age or my misspent youth, sometimes I forget whether I've worked with somebody or not.

I think listening to music from your youth is as powerful as a scent passed beneath your nose.

My half-suppressed Canadian years, my whole childhood and youth, rose like a corpse from the bottom of the sea to confront me.

You might not remember what you had for dinner last night, but you remember everything about one particular summer of your youth. It's like that.

When I recall today my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few individual features, for a different person, were it not for the existence of the chain of memories.

What man is there, surrounded though he be with the love of wife and children, who does not retain a memory of the romantic affection of boys for each other? Having felt it, he could scarcely have forgotten it, and if he never felt it, he missed one of the most golden of the prizes of youth, unrecapturable in mature life.

In August 1914, my father was called to war and then taken prisoner. He died in captivity in Germany on March 27, 1915. My youth - indeed, my entire life - was deeply marked by this, directly and indirectly.

I think that much of this was running in background as I contemplated whether or not to attend the PS 99 reunion, although I certainly anticipated that I would not; it smelled like death, not youth.

The great disadvantage of getting older is to be obliged to relive the salient economic events of one's youth, with nothing learned and nothing forgotten.

In relative youth, we assume we'll remember everything. Someone should urge the young to think otherwise.

In teaching, regard must be had to the faculties possessed by the pupil. In childhood, memory; in youth, the understanding; in mature life, the reason is the predominating faculty.

As kids, we say stupid things, and because there's not a record of it, nobody is going to give you a hard time at 30 years old about something you said or did when you were 8 years old. Online, you have all these social networks that are moving to a state of persistent identity, and in turn, we're sacrificing the ability to be youthful.

I'm sure there's some awful video of me singing when I was, like, 13 or 15 at my old school that my dad didn't take down off YouTube.

Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.

As music migrates into our iPods, CD collections require less and less room, residing in our heads rather than resounding off the walls. The protracted labor of amassing a personal music library has lost its detective zeal.

New Zealand was such a weird place in the 1980s. For instance, we used to have this commercial in the late 1970s where this guy drives this car and stops outside a corner store. He goes in to buy something, and when he comes out, his car is gone. He's like, 'Huh?' Then a voice says, 'Don't leave your keys in the car.'

I don't get ideas, I have them. The trick is to remember where I've put them.

My goal is more to be remembered. They'll remember this thing and like it in the future. The trick is to stay remembered long enough for that to happen.

My husband is stricken with dementia, and it's a trick of his condition that events and people from his past are more real to him than what happened five minutes ago.

Once you get a trick on film, it's there forever.

Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.