Quotes About Memory

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.

It is true that one of the first acts of tyrants is to erase history, to wipe out the recorded memory of a people. With that in mind, it's important to remember that the work that we do as writers, artists and performers will form an essential part of the collective memory that future generations will draw upon. And so we owe it to those future generations to defend that memory and be honest witnesses to our times.

Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.

When we have the same thought again, the line of the original thought is deepened, causing what's called a memory trace. With each repetition the trace goes deeper and deeper, forming and embedding a pattern of thought. When an emotion is tied to this thought pattern, the memory trace grows exponentially stronger.

Images flicker, each one bringing its own sorrow or its own smile. Sometimes both. At the very worst, an impenetrable and sightless black and at best, a happiness so bright that it hurts the eyes to see, coming and going on some unseen projector perpetually turned by an invisible hand. One, then another. The hollow click of the shutter. Now stop. Freeze this frame. Pluck it down and hold it close and be damned by what you see. Henri always said: the price of a memory is the memory if the sorrow it brings.

Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory.

A people's memory is history; and as a man without a memory, so a people without a history cannot grow wiser, better.

I 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.

All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.

I think all writing is political. All writing shows a preoccupation with something, whatever that thing might be, and by putting pen to paper you are establishing a hierarchy of some sort - this emotion over that emotion, this memory over that memory, this thought over another. And isn't that process of establishing a hierarchy on the page a kind of political act?

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

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.

Dreams have consequences. There is no turning back. A revolution is not a painless march to the gates of freedom and justice. It is a struggle between rage and hope, between the temptation to destroy and the desire to build. Its temperament is desperate. It is a tormented response to the past, to all that has happened, the recalled and unrecalled injustices - for the memory of a revolution reaches much further back than the memory of its protagonists.

If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.

Pain does not create a long-lasting memory, but the memory of luxury exerts itself for ever.

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.

The human brain had a vast memory storage. It made us curious and very creative. Those were the characteristics that gave us an advantage - curiosity, creativity and memory. And that brain did something very special. It invented an idea called 'the future.'

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

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.

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.

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?

Because 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.

I think cinema is the memory and the imagination of the country. Take the memory and imagination out of an individual, and he stops being an individual. I think its the same thing for a country.

Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all.

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.

The White House begun airing their TV commercials to re-elect the president, and the John Kerry campaign is condemning his use of 9/11 in the ads. He said, it is unconscionable to use the tragic memory of a war in order to get elected, unless of course, it's the Vietnam War.

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

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.

It will be difficult to return to racing this weekend after Marco's terrible accident in Sepang but I think it is the best thing we can do to honour him,” says World Champ Casey Stoner. We know we all play a risky game and, even if compared to the past the safety of our sport is much better, unfortunately these kind of events still occur. We will go out there this weekend and try to put on a good show for all the fans and especially in memory of Marco.

Memory 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.

Be 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.

in Italy, almost at every step, history and poetry add to the graces of nature, sweeten the memory of the past, and seem to preserve it in eternal youth.

Africa has a genious for extremes, for the beginning and the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day more vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant. Nowhere is there a continent more miserable

Some people have this really clear memory of making that decision, and I don't. My earliest memories of being involved with drama or acting were in elementary school. My sister and I got dropped off at an after-school improvisation class, a time-killer for kids while parents were doing the groceries. I'm 6 years old, and I remember running amok and playing these games.

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

The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and comcribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.

To the Memory of those faithful brown slave-men of the plantations throughout the South, Daddy's contemporaries all, who during the war while their masters were away fighting in a cause opposed to their emancipation, brought their blankets and slept outside their mistresses' doors, thus keeping night-watch over otherwise unprotected women and children -- a faithful guardianship of which the annals of those troublous times record no instance of betrayal.

He also tried to block the doorway when she left him. My mother ducked under his arm, ran to her car, and drove away. I remember thinking that this was somehow romantic, as it pinpointed the actual memory of my mother's departure, something you don't see a lot of in television. Real people don't slam doors without opening them five minutes later because it's raining and they forgot their umbrella. They don't stop dead in their tracks because they realize they're in love with their best friend.They don't say, "I'm leaving you, Jack," and fade to a paper towel commercial.

Today, recall a favorite memory, which serves as a gateway to uplifting feelings and thoughts.

I watched a film with a very famous, great, great actor, I won't mention his name because everyone loves his memory, but I thought, "God he was acting a lot." Great actor, but nonstop acting. Wall to wall, fitted-carpet acting.

Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife.

In the enlightenment cycle, attention is paid to bringing back the awareness field from other lives. This does not simply mean memory, but rather the internal power and intelligence that you have amassed in other lifetimes.

My earliest memory is aged three, seeing sunlight on water and feeling it was really magical.

If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t hassle a browser – and steal the contents of books by reading them. I drank down 1984 while loitering in the 'O' section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping vessel of my attention carefully out of the shop.