Quotes About Memory

Memory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest - something written over something partially erased - that is what memory is for me. It's not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It's like theater, with characters who appear from time to time.

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

The very first thing an executive must have is a fine memory. Of course it does not follow that a man with a fine memory is necessarily a fine executive. But if he has the memory he has the first qualification, and if he has not the memory nothing else matters.

Advent's intention is to awaken the most profound and basic emotional memory within us, namely, the memory of the God who became a child. This is a healing memory; it brings hope. The purpose of the Church's year is continually to rehearse her great history of memories, to awaken the heart's memory so that it can discern the star of hope.

One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of the collective memory.

My biggest fear is losing memory because memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive is tied up in memory.

While the repression of a memory is a psychological process, the suppression of feeling is accomplished by deadening a part of the body or reducing its motility so that feeling is diminished. The repression of the memory is dependent upon and related to the suppression of feeling, for as long as the feeling persists, the memory remains vivid. Suppression entails the development of chronic muscular tension in those areas of the body where the feeling would be experienced. In the case of sexual feeling, this tension is found in and about the abdomen and pelvis

Peace. That's what salaam means. Peace unto you." The words brought forth an echo from Ender's memory. His mother's voice reading to him softly, when he was very young. ... The kiss, the word, the peace were with him still. I am only what I remember, and Alai is my friend in a memory so intense that they can't tear him out. Like Valentine, the strongest memory of all.

To use the image of Che Guevara to sell vodka is a slur on his name and memory. He never drank himself, he was not a drunk, and drink should not be associated with his immortal memory... As a supporter of the ideals for which Che Guevara died, I am not averse to its reproduction by those who wish to propagate his memory and the cause of social justice throughout the world.

The time must come to all of us, who live long, when memory is more than prospect. An angler who has reached this stage and reviews the pleasure of life will be grateful and glad that he has been an angler, for he will look back on days radiant with happiness, peaks of enjoyment that are no less bright because they are lit in memory by the light of a setting sun.

Quietly, like a night bird, floating, soaring, wingless. We glide from shore to shore, curving and falling but not quite touching; Earth: a distant memory seen in an instant of repose, crescent shaped, ethereal, beautiful, I wonder which part is home, but I know it doesn't matter... the bond is there in my mind and memory; Earth: a small, bubbly balloon hanging delicately in the nothingness of space.

There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.

You've got to be careful smoking weed. It causes memory loss. And also, it causes memory loss.

I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

It was weird to be in a movie that's very clearly a period piece like Killing Reagan, but that's about a time that's within my own memory. That's really weird. And conscious memory, not just vague.

What you think of as they past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace -- and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is "borrowed" from the Now.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

Apparently there is redundancy in memory: You store the same memory in different parts of your brain for accessing at different speeds. That speed would depend on the frequency of use and the importance of the knowledge.

When I did "Top of the Pops" for the first time, Ace of Base was one of the other bands, and I have a memory of them on a small stage next to me in the TV studio. A memory of their performance is burned into my mind. Seared.

The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.

I'm aware of everything - it's my job - I keep up to speed, and I have a blessed memory. The brain chemistry I have is such that my memory is wonderful. And sometimes it's helpful, and other times it ends up being frustrating.

And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: ‘A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound change.’ Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely.

Many memory techniques involve creating unforgettable imagery, in your minds eye. Thats an act of imagination. Creating really weird imagery really quickly was the most fun part of my training to compete in the U.S. Memory Competition.

I have more questions than answers in this world as do most poets and writers. The field of memory we exist in is absolutely encompassing and is both a question and answer. It is memory that provides the heart with impetus, fuels the brain, and propels the corn plant from seed to fruit.

I started to realize, a lot of times if you go into your memory, your sense memory, you know more than you think you do, from having watched and listened.

Do not allow past experiences to be imprinted on your mind. Perform asanas each time with a fresh mind and with a fresh approach. If you are repeating what you did before, you are living in the memory, so you are living in the past. That means you don't want to proceed beyond the experience of the past. Retaining that memory is saying, 'Yesterday I did it like that.' When I ask, 'Is there anything new from what I did yesterday?' then there is progress. Am I going forward or am I going backward? Then you understand how to create dynamism in a static asana.

The average person's short-term memory can hold only five to seven bits of data at any one moment. If you put more items in, others fall out. The older you are, the more you have crammed into those memory circuits. Twenty-five-year-olds can remember things because they still have empty space. Some of us take our children to the supermarket in the hope they will remember why we are there.

Paradoxically one of the greatest advantages of mind maps is that they are seldom needed again. The very act of constructing a map is itself so effective in fixing ideas in memory that very often a whole map can recalled without going back to it at all. A mind map is so strongly visual and uses so many of the natural functions of memory that frequently it can be simply read off in the mind's eye.

What a glorious night. Every face I see is a memory. It may not be a perfectly perfect memory. Sometimes we had our ups and downs. But we're all together and you're mine for a night. And I'm going to break precedent and tell you my one-candle wish...that you would have a life as lucky as mine, where you can wake up one morning and say, 'I don't want anything more'. Sixty-five years. Don't they go by in a blink?

Memory is slippery. It bends to our understanding of the world, twists to accommodate our prejudices. It is unreliable. Witnesses seldom remember the same things. They identify the wrong people. They give us the details of events that never happened. Memory is slippery, but my memories suddenly feel slipperier.

That's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory— hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can built off our pasts and make future.

As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate.

The only moment ever available to you is the present moment. Everything else is memory or imagination.

Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.

a dream is only a memory of the future

With most men, scarce a link of memory holds yesterday and to-day together.

Stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards has been the way of the world through the ages. Today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified.

There have been studies done on people who meditate and they have found that they actually have increased grey matter in certain parts of their brain and more neural conductivity, meaning more connections between certain parts of the brain. They have increased capacity for, in some cases, memory, or reasoning.

A new day is here. Yesterday is a memory. Tomorrow is unknown. Now is the knowing.

When you develop software, the people who write the software, the developers are the key group but the testers also play an absolutely critical role. They're the ones who ah, write thousands and thousands of examples and make sure that it's going to work on all the different computers and printers and the different amounts of memory or networks that the software'11 be used in. That's a very hard job.

Memory is the scribe of the soul.

Memory is a poet, not an historian.

If you’re so forgetful that you’re incapable of remembering that a co-worker isn’t pregnant on three separate occasions in as many months, I worry about your memory and cognition skills.

Since Percy’d lost his memory,his whole life was one big fillin-the-blank. He was____________________, from____________________. He felt like ____________________, and if the monsters caught him, he’d be____________________.