Popular quotes about Memory! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
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 ColtonMemory 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 MurakamiThere's something known as "memory conformity," also known as "social contagion of memory," which refers to a situation where one person's telling of a memory influences another person's account of that same experience.
Rob RobergeWhat is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.
Joyce Carol OatesI think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don't consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows.
Brian GreeneThere's something about being able to literally consume a work of art - then to divide all that pleasure of it - because it's a memory. A great wine for me is a memory, it's an extraordinary experience.
Robert B. ParkerMemory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.
Julian BarnesTo live (as I understand it) is to exist within a conception of time. But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time. Every memory, no matter how remote its subject, takes place 'Now,' at the moment it's called to the mind. The more something is recalled, the more the brain has a chance to refine the original experience. Because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.
David MazzucchelliWhere there is a living memory of struggle, they have a living memory of the rebellion. Where there's no struggle afterward the rebellion is forgotten.
Vijay PrashadWhy? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?
Bernhard SchlinkIt's realizing that a great dream is not as good as a great memory. The dream can be had by anyone. The memory - must be made.
Eric ThomasThe question of truth is really a question of memory, deep memory, for it deals with something prior to ourselves and can succeed in uniting us in a way that transcends our petty and limited individual consciousness. It is a question about the origin of all that is, in whose light we can glimpse the goal and thus the meaning of our common path.
Pope FrancisWe'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.
Joshua FoerMemory 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.
Julio CortazarPain does not create a long-lasting memory, but the memory of luxury exerts itself for ever.
Paul TherouxIt 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.
Cynthia NixonMany 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 HofstadterLife," 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.
John IrvingI 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 HoffmanA friend's loyalty lasts longer than their memory. Over the course of a long friendship, you might fight with your friend, even get angry with them. But a true friend will forget that anger after a while, because their loyalty to their friend outweighs the memory of the disagreement.
Matthew ReillyI could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
Pat ConroyIt 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.
Edgar DegasMom said, "His spirit is there," and that made me really angry. I told her, "Dad didn't have a spirit! He had cells!" "His memory is there." "His memory is here," I said, pointing at my head. "Dad had a spirit," she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, "He had cells, and now they're on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!
Jonathan Safran FoerWhen a child speaks of a past life memory, the effects ripple far. At the center is the child, who is directly healed and changed. The parents standing close by are rocked by the truth of the experience - a truth powerful enough to dislodge deeply entrenched beliefs. For observers removed from the actual event - even those just reading about it - reports of a child's past life memory can jostle the soul toward new understanding. Children's past life memories have the power to change lives.
Carol Bowman[Harold Pinter] is a British playwright and is one of my favorite writers. Harold was very obsessed with when memory becomes mythology, that at some point you change your memory to fit who you believe you are.
Baron VaughnAn 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 JamesonIt seems to me, that this, too, is how memory works. What we remember of what was done to us shapes our view, molds us, sets our stance. But what we remember is past, it no longer exists, and yet we hold on to it, live by it, surrender so much control to it. What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory, when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we've inherited or devised? When we, ourselves, can taste that freedom.
Rebecca WalkerCoaches and players at the start must think their way through problems where a more experienced person would react out of habit and memory. One must not gain this experience, however, without being careful of empty redundancy. Do not fall into the error of the artist who boasts of 20 years of experience at his craft while, in fact, all he has had is one year - 20 times.
John KesselWhen 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.
C. S. LewisToday is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.
Thomas CarlyleSelection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
William JamesProphet may you be! If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth, when time is old and hath forgot itself, when waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy, and blind oblivion swallowed cities up, and mighty states characterless are grated to dusty nothing, yet let memory, from false to false, among false maids in love, upbraid my falsehood!
William ShakespearePeople 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.
Nick MorganI 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.
Anthony HopkinsSince Percyโd lost his memory,his whole life was one big fillin-the-blank. He was____________________, from____________________. He felt like ____________________, and if the monsters caught him, heโd be____________________.
Rick RiordanThe 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 ThomsonNo 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 BlackwoodTechnologies first equipped the territorial body with bridges, aqueducts, railways, highways, airports, etc. Now that the most powerful technologies are becoming tiny - microtechnologies, all technologies can invade the body. These micro-machines will feed the body. Research is being conducted in order to create additional memory for instance.
Paul VirilioI always thought old age would be a writerโs best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memoryโs gone, all the old fluencyโs disappeared. I donโt write a single sentence without saying to myself, โItโs a lie!โ So I know I was right. Itโs the best chance Iโve ever had.
Samuel BeckettTo an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep.
George EliotPoetry 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.
Eavan BolandThis great Mughal Emperor [Akbar] was illiterate; he could neither read nor write. However, that had not stopped Akbar from cultivating the acquaintance of the most learned and cultured poets, authors, musicians, and architects of the time - relying solely on his remarkable memory during conversations with them.
Indu Sundaresan