Popular quotes about Memory! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 24
Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemd a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore... Warm with life, hopeless unstable.
Haruki MurakamiThe act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.
Elie WieselMemory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?
Martin Farquhar TupperThat is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.
Elie WieselIf there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.
Gaston BachelardAll the charm of the angler's life would be lost but for these hours of thought and memory. All along the brook, all day on lake or river, while he takes his sport, he thinks. All the long evenings in camp, or cottage, or inn, he tells stories of his own life, hears stories of his friend's lives, and if alone calls up the magic of memory.
William Cowper PrimeRAM: This gives guys a way of deciding whose computer has the biggest, studliest memory. That's important, because the more memory a computer has, the faster it can produce error messages.
Dave BarryWe live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.
Julian BarnesMemory 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.
Joyce Carol OatesSeveral sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory.
Honore de BalzacAs 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.
Ayelet WaldmanSometimes I wanted to take a memory - one perfect memory - curl up in it, and go to sleep.
Kiersten WhiteBut I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.
Anselm KieferFor all aspects of memory, keep yourself physically fit. My catchphrase is, Healthy mind, healthy body, healthy body, healthy mind. Your memory needs oxygen as fuel, so why not feed it often?
Tony BuzanI believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
William Butler YeatsI sell ideas. Actually, if you think about it, everything is really no more than idea. The past is nothing more than a memory, which is one kind of idea. The future is still a hope, another kind of idea. The present is fleeting and becomes a memory before you can put your hands on it. All ideas. I sell ideas.
Ted DekkerMany people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory.
Douglas HofstadterMemory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now,the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.
Michel de Montaigne'Moonwalking with Einstein' refers to a memory device I used when I memorized a deck of playing cards at the U.S. Memory Championship. When I competed in 2006, I set a new U.S. record by memorizing a deck of cards in one minute and 40 seconds. That record has since fallen.
Joshua FoerLife attacks us like a blind beast. It swallows up time, the years of our life, it passes like a typhoon and leaves nothing behind. Not even memory, because memory is made of the same swift, ungraspable substance out of which illusions emerge and then disappear.
รlvaro MutisI must say a few words about memory. It is full of holes. If you were to lay it out upon a table, it would resemble a scrap of lace. I am a lover of history . . . [but] history has one flaw. It is a subjective art, no less so than poetry or music. . . . The historian writes a truth. The memoirist writes a truth. The novelist writes a truth. And so on. My mother, we both know, wrote a truth in The 19th Wifeโ a truth that corresponded to her memory and desires. It is not the truth, certainly not. But a truth, yes . . . Her book is a fact. It remains so, even if it is snowflaked with holes.
David EbershoffHas it ever struck you ... that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going? Itโs really all memory ... except for each passing moment.
Eric KandelYou could make a good case that the history of social life is about the history of the technology of memory. That social order and control, structure of governance, social cohesion in states or organizations larger than face-to-face society depends on the nature of the technology of memory - both how it works and what it remembers. In short, what societies value is what they memorize, and how they memorize it, and who has access to its memorized form determines the structure of power that the society represents and acts from.
Eben MoglenOne 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 PenkovFear is the memory of pain. Addiction is the memory of pleasure. Freedom is beyond both.
Deepak ChopraThe memory should be specially taxed in youth, since it is then that it is strongest and most tenacious. But in choosing the things that should be committed to memory the utmost are and forethought must be exercised; as lessons well learnt in youth are never forgotten.
Arthur SchopenhauerWhat 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?
Anthony HopkinsBecause computers have memories, we imagine that they must be something like our human memories, but that is simply not true. Computer memories work in a manner alien to human memories. My memory lets me recognize the faces of my friends, whereas my own computer never even recognizes me. My computer's memory stores a million phone numbers with perfect accuracy, but I have to stop and think to recall my own.
Alan CooperI wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.
Igor StravinskyRead yourself, not books. Truth isn't outside, that's only memory, not wisdom. Memory without wisdom is like an empty thermos bottle - if you don't fill it, it's useless.
Ajahn ChahI have had the advantage of the opportunity to meet with Mr. Trump on several occasions. And my experience is that he's very intelligent. He's thirsty for information. He wants to hear what you have to say. He listens to his advisers. He digests the information very quickly, and he's got a good memory, because I remember one time I was talking to him about something, and then he pulled some information out of his memory banks that was a great connection that I hadn't even thought to mention to him.
Kris KobachThe moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.
W. G. SebaldI started making work, and it's like, yes you are calling out all of these things that are part of your memory, your body's memory, things that have gone through your pores, what you've seen, what you've experienced, and you spill them out without thinking. I don't think so much about, "Okay, I'm going to make work, and it's going to be about this." It's just going to come out.
Leonardo DrewTo leave a place, you'd best leave everything behind; all your possessions, including memory. Traveling's not as easy as it's made out to be.
Virginia HamiltonAs 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.
Sandra BoyntonI cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
Jorge Luis BorgesEriugena and other Celtic teachers speak of Christ as our memory, as the one who leads us to our deepest identity, as the one who remembers the song of our beginningsย .
John Philip NewellIn all circumstances, I always look for the light and build around it, with little memory of pain.
Diane von FurstenbergWhat frightens you? What makes the hair on your arms rise, your palms sweat, the breath catch in your chest like a wild thing caged? Is it the dark? A fleeting memory of a bedtime story, ghosts and goblins and witches hiding in the shadows? Is it the way the wind picks up just before a storm, the hint of wet in the air that makes you want to scurry home to the safety of your fire? Or is it something deeper, something much more frightening, a monster deep inside that you've glimpsed only in pieces, the vast unknown of your own soul where secrets gather with a terrible power, the dark inside?
Libba BrayHistory could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one's eyelids.
Jodi PicoultFading, with the Night, the memory of a dead love, and the withered leaves of a blighted hope, and the sickly repinings and moody regrets that numb the best energies of the soul: and rising, broadening, rolling upward like a living flood, the manly resolve, and the dauntless will, and the heavenward gaze of faith-the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen!
Lewis CarrollIt was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.
Stephen KingNo place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the walls of memory.
Algernon BlackwoodThere were days - she could remember this - when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure.
Elizabeth Strout