Quotes About Memory

Bill Clinton's favorite memory is Hillary leaning down and putting contact paper in the drawers, in the chest of drawers in Chelsea's dorm room at Stanford. Favorite memory. Favorite memory! Out everything, favorite memory. Now, I would love to hear somebody in the media ask Hillary what contact paper is.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.

The invention of writing will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.

I have been especially fortunate for about 50 years in having two memory banks available-whenever I can't remember something I ask my wife, and thus I am able to draw on this auxiliary memory bank. Moreover, there is a second way In which I get ideas ... I listen carefully to what my wife says, and in this way I often get a good idea. I recommend to ... young people ... that you make a permanent acquisition of an auxiliary memory bank that you can become familiar with and draw upon throughout your lives.

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

We only really remember things for five years. After that, what we remember, what's actually etched in our brain is our memory of the thing, not the thing itself. And five years after that, what's left is our memory of the memory.

The 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.

If we lose our memory, we lose ourselves. Forgetting is one of the symptoms of death. Without memory we cease to be human beings.

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.

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

The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.

When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think, The "sublime" object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.

We are too ready to imagine that we are religious, because we know something of religion. We appropriate to ourselves the pious sentiments we read, and we talk as if the thoughts of other men's heads were really the feelings of our own hearts. But piety has not its seat in the memory, but in the affections, for which however the memory is an excellent purveyor, though a bad substitute.

Only 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

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

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.

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.

I see in the FBI 302, which was put out on Memorial Day weekend in print about this big where you needed to use a magnifying glass to read it, but I read it twice, I saw something that really concerned me.It said Hillary Clinton can't remember her exit interview from the CIA because she had no memory for a period of time after she had a concussion. She was secretary of state when she had no memory. Now there's something really seriously wrong with it.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.

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

I'd say my best memory was climbing Mt. Fuji, and the worst memory was... trying to fit my feet into the free giveaway slippers at Japanese schools.

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.

And, 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.

That's grossing money for other people that has a multiplying factor, but the government doesn't see that. It doesn't see that making a film or culture or art is part of our economy. But the main reason is this, it's part of our identity. I think cinema is the memory and the imagination of the country. Take the memory and imagination out of an individual and he's stops being an individual.

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.

Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.

I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?

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.

Memory is a slippery thing. When something terrible happens to you, like the loss of someone you love...memory can turn into a soft blanket that hides you from the loss.

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

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.

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.

I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.

When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

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

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

And 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.

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 treasury and guardian of all things.

People often think of the unconscious mind as "the gut" or perhaps the Freudian "sink" of repressed sexual desires. It's neither one of those things. It's the repository of memory, and it's the seat of decision making.

It is so often the odd, the unexpected, the apparently trifling, that stamps itself upon the memory for ever, while much more memorable things pass away like a breath of wind.

Let your memory be your travel bag.

In the end, the only events of my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world erupted into this transitory one All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings But my encounters with the 'other' reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved on my memory. In that realm there has always been wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost importance by comparison.

We did not have a television while I was growing up, and so I read voraciously. My earliest memory of being utterly transfixed by a book was Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time.