Quotes About Memory

But pain may be a gift to us. Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory's first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift.

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.

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.

Now, we have inscribed a new memory alongside those others. It's a memory of tragedy and shock, of loss and mourning. But not only of loss and mourning. It's also a memory of bravery and self-sacrifice, and the love that lays down its life for a friend-even a friend whose name it never knew.

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.

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.

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library

Sometimes an idea from six years ago will come to me out of the blue. And maybe I haven't even seen the lyrics I wrote down, but I'll just have this physical memory of having written it, and in my mind I can see the piece of paper, and the words I wrote down, and then by muscle memory, I'll remember the chords that go along with it.

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.

I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?

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.

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

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

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.

The memory of past favors is like a rainbow, bright, vivid, and beautiful; but it soon fades away. The in memory of injuries is engraved on the heart, and remains forever.

Recording stories is a way of honoring the faculty of memory, even if it's recorded, outsourcing memory to technology.

Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That's all there is. That's all we are. Yet most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it's all a shame, and on and on; it's all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

Don't make your wedding a pleasant memory in this life but a source of misery in the next. Make it an eternally good memory. In trying to have a halal wedding, you might sacrifice many relationships but the opposite might mean sacrificing the only relationship that will matter in the hereafter for a bunch of people who don't even really care about you. Don't make one night the cause of your regret for an eternity.

For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.

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.

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

Eriugena 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 beginnings….

My favorite New York memory is that blizzard in '96. I get chills thinking about it. It's my favorite time here - call me crazy. I'm from Canada, and it's very cold up there.

[in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.

The effectiveness of our memory banks is determined not by the total number of facts we take in, but the number we wish to reject.

My earliest acting memory is making up a play for my mom and dad called The Lonesome Baby. I have no idea what The Lonesome Baby was about. I just remember the title. But I'm sure it was an epic.

We're animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it's what binds us as human beings.

My earliest musical memory was getting to watch my dad play drums in a local band. He's a banker by trade, but a drummer at heart. I remember seeing the guitar player do the solo from "Werewolves of London" with his teeth, and that was the moment that had me hooked.

The nineteenth-century way of looking at the photograph was as a mirror for the memory, and at that time the photographs almost looked like mirrors, with their polished metallic surfaces.

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

The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.

Oh, to me not drinking is like being dead, almost. I sit here taking endless journeys down memory lane. It gets boring.

I really thought I was on the way out. My husband Blake saved my life. Often I don't know what I do, then the next day the memory returns. And then I am engulfed in shame.

The dead have nothing except the memory they've left.

There is a deep sense in which we are all ghost towns. We are all haunted by the memory of those we love, those with whom we feel we have unfinished business. While they may no longer be with us, a faint aroma of their presence remains, a presence that haunts us until we make our peace with them and let them go. The problem, however, is that we tend to spend a great deal of energy in attempting to avoid the truth. We construct an image of ourselves that seeks to shield us from a confrontation with our ghosts. Hence we often encounter them only late at night, in the corridors of our dreams.

The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.

Poetry is one of the most fugitive arts: it can be assigned to memory, taken and hidden in the mind, smuggled into smoky cabin back rooms, recited there and then conveyed only by speech to another person. It is therefore the most likely to survive colonization.

Perhaps we are given a mom that we might take into death the memory of a lullaby.

From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jeweled visions of our future.

One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.

Since Steve Jobs died I cannot bear to see anyone use an iPhone irreverently, what I did was a tribute to his memory.

In literature and art memory is a synonym for invention. It is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are empty.

In the world of computers and just devices in general, the lifespan, or the shelf life, is relatively short just because technology moves so fast and the costs drop so quickly and the power, whether it's computing power or memory rises very, very quickly.

Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

The weakest ink is better than the best memory. Study with pen in hand.

I don't find that writing about parts of my life had much effect except in some cases to improve my memory. To get into parts of the past I want to recall very vividly, I use a form of directed meditation.