Quotes About Memory

But Whetstone is positioning Remem as more than a handy virtual assistant: they want it to take the place of your natural memory.

Like such eclectic predecessors as Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, China Miéville, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Chiang has explored conventional tropes of science fiction in highly unconventional ways . . . Likely to linger in the memory the way riddles may linger—teasing, tormenting, illuminating, thrilling.' Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker

With my near-total recall and my ability to correlate, I can assess a situation immediately, and choose the best course of action for my purposes; I'm never indecisive. Only theoretical topics pose a challenge.

But that era is coming to an end. Remem is merely the first of a new generation of memory prostheses, and as these products gain widespread adoption, we will be replacing our malleable organic memories with perfect digital archives. We will have a record of what we actually did instead of stories that evolve over repeated tellings. Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.

Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity," and

People are made of stories

It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn't be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.

words differently each time he told it; he was skilled enough as a storyteller that the arrangement of words didn't matter. It was different for Moseby, who never acted anything out when he gave his sermons; for him, the words were what was important. Jijingi realized that Moseby wrote down his sermons not because his memory was terrible but because he was looking for a specific arrangement of words. Once he found the one he wanted, he could hold on to it for as long as he needed.

perfect memory couldn't be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.

The pain was so deep and so raw. There were days I would have died just to forget. The problem was, I couldn't figure out how to get her out of my mind. How do you kill that kind of pain?

What happened casually remains -

at scars that never felt a wound.

The butterfly jots a note on the wind to remind itself of something.

If the Japanese ever got a foothold, British bikes would quickly become only a nostalgic memory.

I've got a short memory span.

As a young child my attention span was, as I remember it, rather short.

People have a very short attention span when it comes to television, but nobody forgets the movie you do.

I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.

First, when I was 12, I saw a Spanish girl jumping rope. I never saw her face, but it was still the most beautiful sight I'd ever seen.

I have only so many foreign-language neurons. When I learned Spanish, that displaced whatever Irish was left, and then I learned German, and that displaced the Spanish, and when I learned Serbo-Croatian, that displaced the German. So I'm a bit of a muddle.

My buildings will be my legacy... they will speak for me long after I'm gone.

Visually speaking, nothing calls Shakespeare to mind like Hamlet holding Yorick's skull.

American Pie speaks to the loss that we feel. That's why that song has found the niche that it has.

Since I'd developed this fear of not remembering my lines, I took 'Mulholland Drive' as a test for myself. It was a long monologue: no one else speaks.