Memory Quotes - Page 14

Two years of oblivion have reduced me, if not to emptiness, than to something that sits closely beside it. It laid waste all that I was inside, and severed what connection existed between my memory and personality through two years of “living” like a shell, on the boundary of emptiness. And though there was precious little drama here compared to actual societal rejection, it drives me to worry all the same. All my memories are just reflections on the water, and I don’t know whether I’m the reflection or the real thing.
Kinoko Nasu
Time's arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.
Ken Liu
The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
Vladimir Nabokov
Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girlsare always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.
Catherynne M. Valente
the invisible storehouse in nothingness, called memory.
Erich Maria Remarque
Her mother had smelled of cold and scales, her father of stone dust and dog. She imagined her husband's mother, whom she had never met, had a whiff of rotting apples, though her stationary had stunk of baby powder and rose perfume. Sally was starch, cedar, her dead grandmother sandalwood, her uncle, swiss cheese. People told her she smelled like garlic, like chalk, like nothing at all. Lotto, clean as camphor at his neck and belly, like electrified pennies at the armpit, like chlorine at the groin. She swallowed. Such things, details noticed only on the edges of thought would not return. 'Land,' Mathilde said, 'odd name for a guy like you.''Short for Roland,' the boy said.Where the August sun had been steaming over the river, a green cloud was forming. It was still terrifically hot, but the birds had stopped singing. A feral cat scooted up the road on swift paws. It would rain soon.'Alright Roland,' Mathilde said, suppressing as sigh, 'sing your song.
Lauren Groff
How, Dearest, wilt thou have me for most use?A hope, to sing by gladly? or a fineSad memory, with thy songs to interfuse?A shade, in which to sing—of palm or pine?A grave, on which to rest from singing? Choose.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Sometimes the memory of someone is better than the reality of them.
Steve Maraboli
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
That's truth, Harvey, not what's written on a piece of paper or in blood too small to see - but the memory of how it felt being together.
Simon Van Booy
For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable “memory fragment”—often called a “trace” or an “engram”—or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new “trace” to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be “scribbles,” “holograms,” or “imprints”; they could live in “spirals,” “rooms,” or “storage units.” Personally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, I see Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars.
Maggie Nelson
Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.
Lauren Groff
Most people are not really scared of death. They are merely terrified of being taken to a mortuary and/or being buried or cremated and/or being forgotten.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Several died the day the bomb was dropped. Some lived six months after the explosion but died anyway. They were all lost. It was so long ago, young man. To you it is a history story. To me it is my life.
Joseph G. Peterson
The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.
Anthony Burgess
Old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Memory, of course, is unreliable, often evil, but it is the source of our identity."--Tennessee Williams
James Grissom
Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?
Aminatta Forna
A forest fire was making its way along the tinderbox ridges above them, flaring and shimmering against the overcast like the northern lights. Cold as it was he stood there a long time. The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember.
Cormac McCarthy
It is dangerous to use our own ability to access non-traumatic memories as a standard against which we judge a trauma victim’s response.
David Yeung
There are certain songs, and books, and films that are like points of high ground in the memory. Like they are even larger than your own experiences. They never go away.
Graham Joyce
...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'
In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer.
Adam Sisman
When time furtively slips like sand through the fingers and our memory becomes tired and lazy, we recognize we are at war. We are at war with forgetfulness. ("The past was her best friend" )
Erik Pevernagie
We are what we remember. If we lose our memory, we lose our identity and our identity is the accumulation of our experiences. When we walk down the memory lane, it can be unconsciously, willingly, selectively, impetuously or sometimes grudgingly. By following our stream of consciousness we look for lost time and things past. Some reminiscences become anchor points that can take another scope with the wisdom of hindsight. ("Walking down the memory lane" )
Erik Pevernagie
Make someone feel something and you will never be forgotten.
Charlotte Eriksson
Memories come to mind like excavated statuesthat have misplaced their heads.
Wisława Szymborska
She saw how the mind makes forever, in order to store the things it had already lost.
Richard Powers
Memory is sweet.Even when it's painful, memory is sweet.
Li-Young Lee
We have to watch Nana's life slipping away from her like a forgotten word. I thought I understood what's happening to her, but this isn't like being robbed a penny at a time. Memories aren't currency to spend; they're us. Age isn't stealing from my grandmother; it's slowly unwinding her.
Shaun David Hutchinson
...he told me all the things he liked to THINK he thought in the misty past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Begin with “I remember.” Write lots of small memories. If you fall into one large memory, write that. Just keep going. Don’t be concerned if the memory happened five seconds ago or five years ago.
Natalie Goldberg
The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies.
Dexter Palmer
He had managed to lock away everything he didn't want to remember... and the memories returned as well.
Daniel Levine
Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed.
Cormac McCarthy
Memories are important, like the bones of the mind. We build ourselves upon them, flesh and blood moulded around the pictures of what is past.
Paul Kearney
I may appear to suffer from some sort of compulsive repetition syndrome, but these rituals are important to me. I have many places where I sit and think, “I have been here before, I am here now, and I will be here again.” Sometimes, lost in reverie, I remember myself approaching across the same green, or down the same footpath, in 1962 or 1983, or many other times. Sometimes Chaz comes along on my rituals, but just as often I go alone. Sometimes Chaz will say she’s going shopping, or visiting a friend, or just staying in the room and reading in bed. “Why don’t you go and touch your bases?” she’ll ask me. I know she sympathizes. These secret visits are a way for me to measure the wheel of the years and my passage through life. Sometimes on this voyage through life we need to sit on the deck and regard the waves.
Roger Ebert
Some memories made in time will last ages tossed aside.
Adhish Mazumder
A mind wanders, thoughts flee and memories fade. But tattoos, tattoos are forever. And if it is true to say that we carry ourselves with when we travel - then the body may very well be a beautiful canvas for the timeless lessons we learn and will learn when we travel.
lauren klarfeld
If you want big improvements, she said, chew gum. Gum? Sure enough, chewing gum has been shown to improve a person's immediate recall of learned words by some 24 percent. Long-term recall improves by a larger 36 percent. To get the benefit, you actually have to chew gum as you are studying; for some reason you can't merely move your jaw up and down. I also discovered that drinking sage tea increases one's recall of words modestly, as does the odor of rosemary. Something as mundane as coffee provides a benefit, too. Drinking two cups of coffee increases neuronal activity in the frontal lobe, where working memory is controlled, and in the anterior cingulum, where attention is controlled.
Michael Erard
Always resist the temptation to forget the painful parts of your past.
Runescape
You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.Sara looked directly into his eyesI nothing else, you need to remember that. you can't erase history, or change it. it would be like destroying yourself.
Haruki Murakami
It's much easier to hate a memory. I would know.
Renee Ahdieh
He trailed through hallways, ducking under arms no longer there, excusing himself as he pressed through conversations long since ended.
Maggie Stiefvater
There are events in one's life which, no matter how remote, never fade from memory
Jim Corbett
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
His mind was betraying him. Phantoms not heard from in a thousand years rousing slowly from their sleep.
Cormac McCarthy
These memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow-- a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires-- but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. They are completely lost to us. They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are unattainable and we know it.And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us, we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in memory; but the man himself it is not.
Erich Maria Remarque
Nostalgia... the blessing of a merciful memory.
Steve Maraboli
One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy— at the time, not afterwards. Most people don’t realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happiness. Their enjoyment takes the form of reminiscence, and it is always tinged with regret that they had not known at the time how happy they were. But I knew, and my memory (of bad times too) was detailed and intense.
Paul Theroux
(Blurb) Throughout Human Acts the ghost memory of the boy Dong-Ho wanders, refusing to disappear, and so in turn other characters refuse to stop asking 'Why?' Why does power exert itself with brutality? Why does the state silence the enquiries of the bereaved?Why does remembrance pose such a threat to the powerful?
Han Kang
the currency of the future will be memory
Dean Cavanagh
Don't go back over the past. Let it depart, never to return.
Naguib Mahfouz
Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror....
J.R.R. Tolkien
Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here, another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember a memory often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering.
Anthony Doerr
When I look at myself in the mirror, I wonder where everything has gone. Even the things I used to remember with so much clarity now seem dimmer. What happens to memory when it vanishes? What happens to events when everyone who remembers them ceases to remember?
Dean Francis Alfar
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
The two things clearest in my mind were, that a remoteness had come upon the old Blunderstone life—which seemed to lie in the haze of an immeasurable distance; and that a curtain had for ever fallen on my life at Murdstone and Grinby's. No one has ever raised that curtain since. I have lifted it for a moment, even in this narrative, with a reluctant hand, and dropped it gladly. The remembrance of that life is fraught with so much pain to me, with so much mental suffering and want of hope, that I have never had the courage even to examine how long I was doomed to lead it. Whether it lasted for a year, or more, or less, I do not know. I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.
Charles Dickens
He could swear he did not look back, could not—by any optical chance, or in any prism—have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture—which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never—consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past.
Vladimir Nabokov
I imagine the feelings of two people meeting after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't, have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect.
Milan Kundera

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