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Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them
Charles Caleb ColtonIt is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol ... slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was always there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As permanent as a government job.
Arundhati RoyLoss brings pain. Yes. But pain triggers memory. And memory is a kind of new birth, within each of us. And it is that new birth after long pain, that resurrection - in memory - that, to our surprise, perhaps, comforts us.
Sue MillerThe scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.
Tennessee WilliamsGreat music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.
Thomas BeechamThere 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.
Marilynne RobinsonMemory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
Kazuo IshiguroI could still smell her on my fur. It clung to me, a memory of another world. I was drunk with it, with the scent of her. I'd got too close. The smell of summer on her skin, the half-recalled cadence of her voice, the sensation of her fingers on my fur. Every bit of me sang with the memory of her closeness. Too close. I couldn't stay away.
Maggie StiefvaterOnly everyone forgets how seldom our memory is accurate. Having more memory is just a way of distorting a greater amount of the past"p.193
Craig ClevengerMemory is not like a container that gradually fills up, it is more like a tree growing hooks onto which memories are hung. Everything you remember is another set of hooks on which more new memories can be attached. So the capacity of memory keeps on growing. The more you know, the more you can know.
Peter RussellMemory says, 'I did that.' Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields.
Friedrich NietzscheMemory is a tenuous thing. . . . flickering glimpses, blue and white, like ancient, decomposing 16mm film. Happiness escapes me there, where faces are vague and yesterday seems to come tied up in ribbons of pain. Happiness? I look for it intead in today, where memory is something I can still touch, still rely on. I find it in the smiles of new friends, the hope blossoming inside. My happiest memories have no place in the past; they are those I have yet to create.
Ellen HopkinsMemory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.
Ann-Marie MacDonaldAnd, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.
Terry PratchettIn memory, you can access something from the past, anything that you've experienced that you remember - it's there. Now, you might have a memento of it in a photograph or in a film or a building or some clothes that you wore. There might be something that connects you to this memory. But all of us are just all caught in this time, whatever that is.
Annie LennoxI have an awful memory, and I have a great memory. Meaning that, if I'm trying to remember something, I can't remember it. But my recall is fantastic.
Philip Seymour HoffmanOne of the things people often say about America is that it's a such a young country, relatively, and its problem - Europeans say this - is that they have no memory. I don't agree with this. In the Balkans, the problem is that we cannot forget. The problem is we have great memory.
Miroslav PenkovPostmodern theatre seems unwilling to listen to talk about textual or theatrical heritage, which it treats as no more than memory in the technical sense of that word, as an immediately available and reusable memory bank.
Patrice PavisTo attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes. There are 36 grand masters of memory in the world.
Joshua FoerThe 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.
Jennifer JamesI wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.
Igor StravinskyAn animal is not cruel; it lives wholly in the instant leap on its prey, in the present taste of marrow or blood. Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.
Storm JamesonI love that the idea of examining memory, and the way memory is edited was made more interesting because it was being filtered through a writer.
James FrancoI had some vague memory of visiting Canberra as a lad, when we came up with my father by car. But when I made the long train journey from Sydney to Canberra and arrived at the little stop, I did wonder slightly whether this really was the national capital.
John Henry CarverLike Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.
Frederick BuechnerMemory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.
Siri HustvedtBe a collector of good ideas, but don't trust your memory. The best collecting place for all of the ideas and information that comes your way is your journal.
Jim RohnPure suffering has a consciousness, a tongue, a heart all its own and even the memory of it is but a pale unreality when compared with the actual experience.
Mike MasonAnd in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.
Tim O'BrienMemory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.
Mario Vargas LlosaIn all circumstances, I always look for the light and build around it, with little memory of pain.
Diane von FurstenbergAnd he wants you to keep that at the front of your mind? He wants you to stay focused on the darkest seasons of your life? How could that possibly do any good?' . . . He wants you to remember who delivered you from that time. That's the point of holding on to memory: delivery, not darkness.
Ted DekkerBut do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.
Claire MessudThe so-called โcrankโ may be quite original in his ideas. โฆ Invention, however, in the engineering sense involves originality; but not that alone, if the results are to be of value. There is imagination more or less fertile, but with it a knowledge of what has been done before, carried perhaps by the memory, together with a sense of the present or prospective needs in art or industry. Necessity is not always the mother of invention. It may be prevision.
Elihu ThomsonIt's just that the times I'm wrong don't register in your memory with as much clarity as the times I'm right.
Meg CabotA great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.
John Henry NewmanI have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.
Ruth OzekiAnd when the stream Which overflowed the soul was passed away, A consciousness remained that it had left Deposited upon the silent shore Of memory images and precious thoughts That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed.
William WordsworthYou can keep your memory intact, preserve your brain's health, and minimize the risk of aging and senile dementia, things that are greatly feared as people grow older.
Deepak ChopraOur generation, like the one before us, must choose. Without the threat of the Cold War, without the pain of economic ruin, without the fresh memory of World War II's slaughter, it is tempting to pursue our private agendas -- to simply sit back and let history unfold. We must resist the temptation.
William J. ClintonWhat if life after death is all based within memory: you die, and you don't ascend on a bed of clouds to Jesus, but your brain has a terrain that it can use to propel itself further. It's more of a theoretical afterlife. If that's true, all of these theoretical afterlives of people could potentially interact or network. That space seems way more powerful and exciting than reality. This potential boundlessness is more of what god is to me.
Blake ButlerI wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.
Marilynne RobinsonWe die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
T. S. Eliot