Quotes About Memory

Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.

think of how many millions of details our eyes see every moment that do not stay in our memory-but one which contains worlds. Boundless worlds. They are those worlds that the young Marcel rediscovers, bewildered, every morning, in the first pages of Remembrances of Things Past, in the vertigo of the moment when consciousness emerges like a bubble from unfathomable depths.

Time opens up our limited access to the world. Time, then, is the form in which we beings, whose brains are made up essentially of memory and foresight, interact with the world: it is the source of identity.

Music can occur only in time, but if we are always in the present moment, how is it possible to hear it? It is possible, Augustine observes, because our consciousness is based on memory and on anticipation.

What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.

But there is a third ingredient in the foundation of our identity, and it is probably the essential one—it is the reason this delicate discussion is taking place in a book about time: memory.

Augustine's exposition of the idea is quite beautiful. It is based on our experience of music. When we listen to a hymn, the meaning of a sound is given by the ones that come before and after it. Music can occur only in time, but if we are always in the present moment, how is it possible to hear it? It is possible, Augustine observes, because our consciousness is based on memory and on anticipation.

And hence this is what time is: it is entirely in the present, in our minds, as memory and as anticipation.

It is with respect to that physical system to which we belong—due to the peculiar way in which it interacts with the rest of the world, thanks to the fact that it allows traces and because we, as physical entities, consist of memory and anticipation—that the perspective of time opens up for us, like our small, lit clearing.

It's suffering because we must lose what we have and are attached to. Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.

Anche le parole che ora diciamo il tempo nella sua rapina ha già portato via e nulla torna (I, 11)

Even the words that we are speaking now thieving time has stolen away, and nothing can return. (I, 11)

Why do we remember the past and not the future? Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us? What does it really mean to say that time "passes"? What ties time to our nature as persons, to our subjectivity? What am I listening to when I listen to the passing of time?

It is the presence of abundant traces of the past that produces the familiar sensation that the past is determined.

La fisica del XIX e XX secolo si è scontrata con queste domande ed è incappata in qualcosa di inaspettato e sconcertante, assai più del fatto, in fondo marginale, che il tempo passi a velocità diverse in luoghi diversi. La differenza fra passato e futuro - fra causa e effetto, fra memoria e speranza, fra rimorso e intenzione - nelle leggi elementari che descrivono i meccanismi del mondo non c'è.

I am this long ongoing novel. My life consists of it. It is memory that solders together the processes scattered across time of which we are made. In this sense, we exist in time. It is for this reason that I am the same person today as I was yesterday. To understand ourselves means to reflect on time. But to understand time, we need to reflect on ourselves.

This is the flow of time familiar from our experience. It is inside there that it nestles. Inside of us. The utterly crucial presence of traces of the past in our neurons. Proust could not be more explicit on this matter. Writing in the first book, "Reality is formed only by memory" and memory in its turn is a collection of traces-an indirect product of the disordering of the world.

Books contain our history; our brains swarm with memories.

Why do we remember the past and not the future?

Happy and master of himself is the man who for every day of his life can say: "Today I have lived; tomorrow if God extends for us a horizon of dark clouds or designs a morning of limpid light, he will not change our poor past he will do nothing without the memory of events that the fleeting hour will have assigned to us.

Memory is this, not the target dead on center but the hurt unwept.

Yes, I will be a writer and make all of you live again in my words.

Men who had poetry in their soul come silently into the world and live quietly down the years, and yet when they are gone no moon in the sky is lucid enough to compare with the light they shed when they are among the living.

Memory is the most potent truth. Show me history untouched by memories and you show me lies.