Quotes by Journalists - Page 148

Memory will lay its hands upon your breast, and you will understand my hatred.
Gwendolyn B. Bennett
She was also a memory, the worst kind of memory--the kind that pulled you to your knees at just the sound of her name.
Laura Miller
Only with steadfast memories can we now be strong so as to undo the mistakes of the past, to begin anew and build from the rubble of their betrayal...
F. Sionil Jose'
To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.
Joshua Foer
The gates of memory would roll open—old joys would stretch out their arms to them, old hopes and dreams would call to them, and they would stir beneath the burden that lay upon them, and feel its forever immeasurable weight. They could not even cry out beneath it; but anguish would seize them, more dreadful than the agony of death.
Upton Sinclair
Tarrou had "lost the match," as he put it. But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing affection and being destined one day to remember it. So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarrou, perhaps, would have called that winning the match.
Albert Camus
But sometimes the memories feel so real, so visceral, so personal, that I confuse them with my own.
Gayle Forman
I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the house where I grew up even though I have not been inside it for decades . . . I want to be able to walk through the house of my own life until my life is done. I want to hold on to who and what I have been even as both become somehow inevitably less.
Anna Quindlen
I was right when I said a very long time ago that our age would leave few living documents behind it: it was rare for anyone to keep a diary, letters were short and businesslike--"I'm alive and well"--and few memoirs were written. There are many reasons for this. Let me mention just one, not perhaps recognized by everybody: we were too often at loggerheads with our own past to give it proper thought. Within the half-century, our ideas on people and events have changed many times; conversations were broken off in mid-sentence; thoughts and feelings could not but be affected by circumstances.
Ilya Ehrenburg
How unfortunate is the guy who does not live in the extravagant memory of an infatuated young woman.
Manu Joseph
But then comes a time when forgetting isn't possible. And I do mean a particular time when no amount of dreaming, not then and maybe not ever, can change how naked and unimportant we become in our own eyes.
Stig Dagerman
He was really quite addicted to her face, and yet for the longest time he could not remember it at all, it being so much brighter than sunlight on a pool of water that he could only recall that blinding brightness; then after awhile, since she refused to give him her photograph, he began to practice looking away for a moment when he was still with her, striving to uphold in his inner vision what he had just seen (her pale, serious, smooth and slender face, oh, her dark hair, her dark hair), so that after immense effort he began to retain something of her likeness although the likeness was necessarily softened by his fallibility into a grainy, washed-out photograph of some bygone court beauty, the hair a solid mass of black except for parallel streaks of sunlight as distinct as the tines of a comb, the hand-tinted costume sweetly faded, the eyes looking sadly, gently through him, the entire image cob-webbed by a sheet of semitranslucent Thai paper whose white fibers twisted in the lacquered space between her and him like gorgeous worms; in other words, she remained eternally elsewhere.
William T. Vollmann
As usual, he saves his wife's for last. He leans on the cane and he looks at the headstone and he thinks about many things. Taffy. He thinks about taffy. He thinks it would take his teeth out now, but he would eat it anyhow, if it meant eating it with her.
Mitch Albom
What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence?
Joshua Foer
But memory is less disposed to compromise
Albert Camus
Regard for the past only extends to its outward forms.
Henrik Bering
The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember.
Jacob A. Riis
...education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can't have higher-level learning- you can't analyze-without retrieving information.' And you can't retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between "learning" and "memorizing" is false, Matthews contends. You can't learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can't memorize without learning.
Joshua Foer
Memory deludes me. I have just remembered something that I completely forgot after it happened. I remembered it again when I was about sixteen, and then I forgot it again. And this morning I remembered not the event itself but the previous recollection, which itself was more than forty years ago, as though an old moon were reflected in a windowpane from which it was reflected in a lake, from where memory draws not the reflection itself, which no longer exists, but only its whitened bones.
Amos Oz
The instant is gone, time has carried us into the realm of memory, it was like this, no, it was not, and everything becomes what we choose to invent.
José Saramago
What I know are simple truths. I know that the fabric of memory is reinforced by stories, rent by silences. I know that power dreads memory. I know that memory outlasts power's viciousness. I know . . . that a voiceless man is as good as dead.
Okey Ndibe
He had talked to hundreds of witnesses. And he knew that if someone felt pressured, they would try too hard, and their imagination would fill what their memory couldn't recover.
Chelsea Cain
War ends at the moment when peace permanently wins out. Not when the articles of surrender are signed or the last shot is fired, but when the last shout of a sidewalk battle fades, when the next generation starts to wonder whether the whole thing ever really happened. World War II ended as war always ends -- by trailing off into nothingness and doubt. Its final monument has never been seen by mortal eyes. It's a phantom image at the edge of a rumor: an unmarked grave in the depths of the South American jungle where a weird and decrepit old man, half forgotten by the world, at last entered the lists of oblivion.
Lee Sandlin
Memory is the enemy of wonder
Michael Pollan
Novelty has a way of intensifying memory. The less often you do something, the deeper the memory burrows in.
Meghan Daum
People have two deaths: the first at the end of their lives, when they go away, and the second at the end of the memory of their lives, when all who remember them are gone. Then a person quits the world completely.
Raghu Karnad
I don't know what it is about the food your mother makes for you, especially when it's something that anyone can make - pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad - but it carries a certain taste of memory.
Mitch Albom
...the mind can also be kind and does blot out those episodes of our existence that we can't erase in our consciousness.
F. Sionil Jose'
If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our own transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we've created is a way of fending off mortality. It allows ideas to be efficiently passed across time and space, and for one idea to build on another to a degree not possible when a thought has to be passed from brain to brain in order to be sustained. The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory...But as our culture has transformed from one that was fundamentally based on internal memories to one that is fundamentally based on memories stored outside the brain, what are the implications for ourselves and our society. What we've gained is indisputiable. But what have we traded away?
Joshua Foer
You should just keep your mouth shout! It gets very tedious having you make a snarky comment about everything that someone says in this group.
Jojo Moyes
The uncertainty of the future made them turn their hearts toward the past. They saw themselves in the lost paradise of the deluge, splashing in the puddles in the courtyard, killing lizards to hang on Úrsula, pretending that they were going to bury her alive, and those memories revealed to them the truth that they had been happy together ever since they had had memory.
Gabriel García Márquez
You can map out a whole city according to the weight of memory, like pins on the homicide board tracking the killer's movements. But the connections get thicker and denser and more complicated all the time.
Lauren Beukes
I know what success means to me – it is when you look back at your life and the memories make you smile. That’s what success is to me
Debalina Haldar
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890: “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out,” he wrote. “But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.” Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human,” said Ed.
Joshua Foer
Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory... Everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion - it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.
Albert Camus
The thing is, memory is about trust. We have to trust that what we remember is fact. And we have to trust what other people remember for things we never saw.
James Renner
And because I found it in my youth, the bar was that much more sacred, its image clouded by that special reverence children accord those places where they feel safe. Others might feel this way about a classroom or playground, a theater or church, a laboratory or library or stadium. Even a home. But none of these places claimed me. We exalt what is at hand. Had I grown up beside a river or an ocean, some natural avenue of self-discovery and escape, I might have mythologized it. Instead I grew up 142 steps from a glorious old American tavern, and that has made all the difference.
J.R. Moehringer
How did I picture the life after the grave? I fairly bawled out at him: "A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.
Albert Camus
Shame was a peculiar beast, Naomi knew. She suspected everyone had it: the dragon they wanted to slay. But for her it was different. Naomi wanted to bathe in it, to stand under its waterfall and come out blessed.
Rene Denfeld
Memory is the mother of the muses, prototype Artist. As a rule picks and highlights what is important, omitting what is accidental or trivial. Occasionally, however, is mistaken as all the other artists. Nevertheless it is what I take as a guide page.
Frank Harris
For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.
Eduardo Galeano
This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black -- witch-fires glowing still and red in a great desolation.
Ambrose Bierce
Anna woke with the wonderful feeling bad sleepers have when they know they have slept well. As if they have stolen something and got away with it. At these times the memories of what led up to such deep sleep keep their distance for a few seconds and those few seconds are perhaps the only time the world can ever be said to show mercy.
James Meek
Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.
Lionel Shriver
The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.
Henry Hazlitt
In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.
Gabriel García Márquez
Shame has poor memory.
Gabriel García Márquez
December's wintery breath is already clouding the pond, frosting the pane, obscuring summer's memory...
John Geddes
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
George Orwell
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Italo Calvino
Soon or late, every dog's master's memory becomes a graveyard; peopled by wistful little furry ghosts that creep back unbidden, at times, to a semblance of their olden lives.
Albert Payson Terhune
Even knowing, as I do now, that grace, power, and, yes, love can hide the darkest elements of the human heart, I would do it all again.
Chelsey Philpot
I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.
Gabriel García Márquez
Modernity kills ghostly romance("The Undying Thing")
Barry Pain
But why are you giving this to me if you don’t believe?""Because I know that you do.
Adria J. Cimino
...I live in Ireland every day in a drizzly dream of a Dublin walk...
John Geddes
Work like an angel, dress like a demon, live like a ghost, and dream like a human.
Rebecca McKinsey
The only difference between you and a dream is I haven’t woken up with you
John Geddes
So when I arrived in Saudi Arabia in August of 2001, as there was no chemical, biological, or nuclear war going on, all I prepared for was to be bored until it was time to go home. Obviously, that plan failed.
Brian Castner
It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain
George Orwell