Quotes About Memory

People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories...

In photography there is no meantime. There was just that moment and now there's this moment and in between there is nothing. Photography, in a way, is the negation of chronology.

First, I was like, "I know it! It's dun-dun-DA-dun, dun, DA-DUN, dun DA-DUN." WYATT The rest of us were like, "Reese, dude: that's the Darth Vader song." But that got the Darth Vader song stuck in everybody's head. So whenever somebody tried to sing Beethoven's Fifth, it came out sounding like Darth Vader.

Man is an historical animal, with a deep sense of his own past; and if he cannot integrate the past by a history explicit and true, he will integrate it by a history implicit and false.

Since every nation tends to believe that each of its past wars was fought in self-defence, a drawn war is more likely to be remembered as a victory.

For of fortunes sharpe adversiteeThe worste kynde of infortune is this,A man to han ben in prosperitee,And it remembren, whan it passed is.

The question of what exactly we remember when we listen to old recordings, or whether it can be called remembering at all, becomes less and less answerable over a lifetime.

he had died as late as the New Year of 1939, he would, as Paul Addison says, 'perhaps be remembered today as the most illustrious and interesting failure in twentieth-century British politics'. Certainly until his apotheosis he was more often seen as an 'interesting failure' than as the subject for a study in greatness.

The trick here is, while the actual pleasure begins to recede and blur, we simultaneously bring the imagined pleasure more fully into focus. And when we do, even the memory of the pleasure becomes more and more heightened and imagined, thus anticipation is increased. This kind of anticipation is the spiritual equivalent of a Cheeto and we want them to eat the whole bag.

Press them continually with memory and dream and have them waste their Present there.

I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.

Um eine fremde Sprache recht gut sprechen zu lernen, und würklich in Gesellschaft zu sprechen mit dem eigentlichen Akzent des Volks, muß man nicht allein Gedächtnis und Ohr haben, sondern auch in gewissem Grad ein kleiner Geek sein.

My entire learning process is slow, because I have no visual memory.

'Tis but the wraith of love; yet I linger.

algorithms with names such as BigTable, MapReduce, and Percolator are systematically converting the numerical address matrix into a content-addressable memory, effecting a transformation that constitutes the largest computation ever undertaken on planet Earth.

In our universe, we measure time with clocks, and computers have a "clock speed," but the clocks that govern the digital universe are very different from the clocks that govern ours. In the digital universe, clocks exist to synchronize the translation between bits that are stored in memory (as structures in space) and bits that are communicated by code (as sequences in time). They are clocks more in the sense of regulating escapement than in the sense of measuring time.

The fundamental, indivisible unit of information is the bit. The fundamental, indivisible unit of digital computation is the transformation of a bit between its two possible forms of existence: as structure (memory) or as sequence (code). This is what a Turing Machine does when reading a mark (or the absence of a mark) on a square of tape, changing its state of mind accordingly, and making (or erasing) a mark somewhere else.

Your eyes is camera and your brain is a file cabinet.

Quando se fica velha a memória não é muito boa. - Ela suspirou. - Não é tão ruim esquecer coisas pequenas, é quando não se sabe o que entristece mais, se o outono, porque faz a gente se lembrar de si mesma, ou a primavera, porque se aproveita menos dela do que antes. A coisa mais triste na velhice é talvez não ser mais capaz de tolices. Tradução de Clarice Lispector

When a man dies a world perishes--the world which he bore in his head. The more intelligent the head, the more clear, significant, and comprehensive was its world, the more terrible its destruction.

The past never leaves you. You carry it around with you for as long as you live, like a pale, stubborn worm lodged there in your gut, keeping you up at night.

When we think of the past, we forget the fools and remember the sage. We reverse the process for our own time.

It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth.

I spent a year in that town, one Sunday.