MEMORY QUOTES II
quotations about memory
Memories were the markers of the journey through life. It was necessary to know where you had come from. Only then could you know where you were going.
WILLIAM SHATNER
The Ashes of Eden
Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Post Office Girl
Good things have to be engraved on the memory; bad ones stick there of themselves.
CHARLES READE
White Lies
What is human memory?... It certainly is not a passive recording mechanism, like a digital disc or a tape. It is more like a story-telling machine. Sensory information is broken down into shards of perception, which are broken down again to be stored as memory fragments. And at night, as the body rests, these fragments are brought out from storage, reassembled and replayed. Each run-through etches them deeper into the brain's neural structure. And each time a memory is rehearsed or recalled it is elaborated. We may add a little, lose a little, tinker with the logic, fill in sections that have faded, perhaps even conflate disparate events.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
The Light of Other Days
For the strong magic of conception, mingled with the fumes of memory,
Giveth me a life in all past time, yea, and addeth substance to the future.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Sweet Memory! wafted by thy gentle gale,
Oft up the stream of Time I turn my sail.
SAMUEL ROGERS
The Pleasures of Memory
The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, November 13, 1944
For all of us, explicit memory makes it possible to leap across space and time and conjure up events and emotional states that have vanished into the past yet somehow continue to live in our minds.
ERIC KANDEL
In Search of Memory
Man's memory shapes
Its own Eden within.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Dreamtigers
Memory is the keystone of the arch
On which the mental structure is erect;
That wondrous edifice reaching to heav'n!
C. B. LANGSTON
"Memory"
Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.
UMBERTO ECO
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.
JANE AUSTEN
Mansfield Park
Little soul,
you and I will become
the memory
of a memory of a memory.
A horse
released of the traces
forgets the weight of the wagon.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Harness"
Memories are nothing but the lash with which yesterday flogs tomorrow.
PHILIP MOELLER
The Roadhouse in Arden
Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
PHILIP ROTH
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography
The most important, the longest lasting, the strongest emotional, and the most practiced memories are the ones that are embedded the deepest in the brain, and because we have retrieved them so many times previously, they are the most able to be retrieved. We all hear about people who can remember their youth, their phone number, or street address from 70 years ago, but they cannot recall what they had for breakfast. The memory of this morning's breakfast wasn't rehearsed, and wasn't very important, so it fades away quickly.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
"From Musician to Neuroscientist: An Interview with Daniel Levitin, PhD, author of This Is Your Brain on Music", American Academy of Audiology
He began to seach among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Your memory is not just an abstract idea--it is a real thing stored in a physical place in your brain. So the way you treat your body, whether through healthy habits or unhealthy habits, can directly improve or harm your memory.
KELSEY ALLAN
"11 Surprising Mistakes That Might Be Ruining Your Memory", Bustle, December 1, 2017
God gave us memories that we might have roses in December.
J. M. BARRIE
Courage