MEMORY QUOTES IV
quotations about memory
I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The World of Yesterday
I will never forget that the passing down of memories is the strongest link in the gossamer bridge that binds up as people.
DAVID BALDACCI
Wish You Well
Still Time, great wizard of this earth,
Who holds o'er human minds such sway!
Oft bids to scenes of later birth
Old recollections to give way.
ANNE S. BUSHBY
"Florinda"
Continents of memory had been lost.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
The Diagnosis
You can't run away from memories, no matter how hard you try.
JOHN SAUL
Midnight Voices
Memory is a distracting process, and what we pull from our brains isn't always entirely accurate.
JAMES MCGAUGH
"The Downside of Having an Almost Perfect Memory", Time, December 8, 2017
Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn't mean that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not.
TOBIAS WOLFF
Continuum, summer 1998
As we learn information, there is a slow process that whittles away memories, and it continues whittling them away unless another part of the brain signals the memory is important and overrides it.
RON DAVIS
"To forget or to remember? Memory depends on subtle brain signals", Science Daily, November 22, 2017
Hindsight is of little value in the decision-making process. It distorts our memory for events that occurred at the time of the decision so that the actual consequence seems to have been a "foregone conclusion." Thus, it may be difficult to learn from our mistakes.
DIANE F. HALPERN
Thought and Knowledge
Remembrance wakes with all her busy train,
Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Deserted Village
Memory is never pure. And recollection is always coloured by the life lived since.
JOSEPHINE HART
Sin
The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams.
MARCEL PROUST
Sodom and Gomorrah
Great is this force of memory, excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber! who ever sounded the bottom thereof? yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.
JULIAN BARNES
Talking It Over
Memory may be but a power of coming to the treasury of Fact,
A momentary self-desertion, an absence in spirit from the now,
An actual coursing hither and thither, by the mind, slipped from its leash,
A life, as in the mystery of dreams, spent within the limits of a moment.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Marginalia"
What thousands and millions of recollections there must be in us! And every now and then one of them becomes known to us; and it shows us what spiritual depths are growing in us, what mines of memory.
WILLIAM MOUNTFORD
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Kafka on the Shore