Quotes About Memory

I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

It had all begun, very precisely, he told his mind, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, at Arkhangelsk railway station. No, his mind responded, nothing begins just like that, on a certain date at a certain place. It all began in many places, and at many times, some even before you were born, in foreign countries, and in the minds of others. —

Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.

And this is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can't.

why should we expect our collective memory – which we call history – to be any less fallible than our personal memory?

Not that this let me off the hook. My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I'd been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been. If only this had been the document Veronica had set light to.

I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments.

And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.

My name is Stuart, and I remember everything.

Well, getting our history wrong is part of being a person.

Sejarah bukanlah apa yang terjadi. Sejarah hanyalah apa yang dituturkan sejarawan kepada kita.

At a social event she and I would normally have attended together, an acquaintance came up and said to me, simply, "There's someone missing." That felt correct, in both senses.

But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they—he—had once fitted together. —

Constantly he went back over the evidence of his memories.

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient—it's not useful—to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

I was too far away to observe what color Enid Starkie's eyes were; all I remember of her is that she dressed like a matelot, walked like a scrum-half, and had an atrocious French accent.

The diary was evidence; it was—it might be—corroboration. It might disrupt the banal reiterations of memory. It might jump-start something—though I had no idea what.

Hoe vaak vertellen we ons eigen levensverhaal? Hoe vaak stellen we bij, verfraaien we, laten we handig dingen weg? En hoe langer het leven doorgaat, hoe minder er om ons heen overblijven om onze versie te betwisten, ons eraan te herinneren dat ons leven niet ons leven is, maar alleen het verhaal dat wij erover verteld hebben. Verteld aan anderen, maar - voornamelijk - aan onzelf.

My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I'd been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been.

If asked in a court of law what happened and what was said, I could only attest to the words "heading," "stagnating" and "peaceable." I'd never thought of myself as peaceable—or its opposite—until then. I would also swear to the truth of the biscuit tin; it was burgundy red, with the Queen's smiling profile on it.

Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There were more meanings, more interpretations, a greater variety of available truths. There was more symbolism, Things contained more.

as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records—in words, sound, pictures—you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping. What was the line Adrian used to quote? "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.