Quotes About Recollection

How we remember, what we remember, and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality.

To improve your memory, lend people money.

Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.

Sir, I see a lot of documents in my day-to-day business, and I can't tell you every document that I've seen. It may have passed across my desk. It may not have passed across my desk. I truthfully cannot answer that question, other than to say I don't remember.

No, that's not it. The first time we met was at Fat Tuesday's. Benny was playing, this was, I think in 1989?

I toyed with the idea of playing Ravel's 'Pavane pour une infante defunte' but I couldn't remember if it's a tune or Latin prescription for piles.

As a kid, on the cotton fields, I had this tune in my head. I hummed it and sang it. It was the same melody as 'When A Man Loves A Woman.' I could never, ever forget it.

Harper Collins gave me a letter of intent saying that they want me to pen down my autobiography. When I was recollecting the incidents of my life for that, I selected only those incidents which were turning points in my life. I staged it instead of writing it.

People bring up tweets that I don't even remember, and my general response is, 'I don't know if I said it. I probably said it.' It's just part of what I do.

As people construct a life narrative, researchers have found, they tend to remember more events from the teens and twenties than from any other time. It's called the 'reminiscence bump.'

I'm just one of those people who can always tell the same story twice, forgetting that I've told it already.

I remember everything, even the dates. But I don't want others to remember the details, just the image.

To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back.

In the distant future, I don't want to be remembered; I want to remember!

Memory is like a long, dark street, illuminated at intervals in a light so bright that it shows up every detail. And then one plunges into the dark stretch again.

You're not someone I could forget," he murmured.

And how they could have forgotten him, as though he was just a character in a book, dismissed once the covers closed?

She rolled herself back so she wouldn't leave anything out. Sometimes time spread out like ink in water but it also had an order and one thing could not come without the other coming first.

I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit broken, the memory darkened?

Sometimes it's harder to notice a place you think you know well; you eyes glide over it, seeing it but not seeing it at all. It's almost as if familiarity gives you a kind of temporary blindness. I had to force myself to look harder and try to see beyond the concept of library that was so latent in my brain.

Sometimes it's harder to notice a place you think you know well; your eyes glide over it, seeing it but not seeing it at all. It's almost as if familiarity gives you a kind of temporary blindness.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. —William Faulkner, Light in August

I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it.

Occasionally, I have to think like myself to remember where I put something.