MEMORY QUOTES IV
quotations about memory
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 will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
JOHN IRVING
A Prayer for Owen Meany
The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams.
MARCEL PROUST
Sodom and Gomorrah
Remembrance wakes with all her busy train,
Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Deserted Village
Hindsight is of little value in the decision-making process. It distorts our memory for events that occurred at the time of the decision so that the actual consequence seems to have been a "foregone conclusion." Thus, it may be difficult to learn from our mistakes.
DIANE F. HALPERN
Thought and Knowledge
A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.
STEPHEN KING
Duma Key
I will never forget that the passing down of memories is the strongest link in the gossamer bridge that binds up as people.
DAVID BALDACCI
Wish You Well
Still Time, great wizard of this earth,
Who holds o'er human minds such sway!
Oft bids to scenes of later birth
Old recollections to give way.
ANNE S. BUSHBY
"Florinda"
So many versions of just one memory, and yet none of them were right or wrong. Instead, they were all pieces. Only when fitted together, edge to edge, could they even begin to tell the whole story.
SARAH DESSEN
Just Listen
Great is this force of memory, excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber! who ever sounded the bottom thereof? yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
As we learn information, there is a slow process that whittles away memories, and it continues whittling them away unless another part of the brain signals the memory is important and overrides it.
RON DAVIS
"To forget or to remember? Memory depends on subtle brain signals", Science Daily, November 22, 2017
You can't run away from memories, no matter how hard you try.
JOHN SAUL
Midnight Voices
Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
Memory is a distracting process, and what we pull from our brains isn't always entirely accurate.
JAMES MCGAUGH
"The Downside of Having an Almost Perfect Memory", Time, December 8, 2017
Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
Memory is never pure. And recollection is always coloured by the life lived since.
JOSEPHINE HART
Sin
Memory may be but a power of coming to the treasury of Fact,
A momentary self-desertion, an absence in spirit from the now,
An actual coursing hither and thither, by the mind, slipped from its leash,
A life, as in the mystery of dreams, spent within the limits of a moment.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
What thousands and millions of recollections there must be in us! And every now and then one of them becomes known to us; and it shows us what spiritual depths are growing in us, what mines of memory.
WILLIAM MOUNTFORD
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Kafka on the Shore
But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.
JULIAN BARNES
Talking It Over
True memory, which we must now endeavour to understand, consists of knowledge of past events, but not of all such knowledge. Some knowledge of past events, for example what we learn through reading history, is on a par with the knowledge we can acquire concerning the future: it is obtained by inference, not (so to speak) spontaneously. There is a similar distinction in our knowledge of the present: some of it is obtained through the senses, some in more indirect ways. I know that there are at this moment a number of people in the streets of New York, but I do not know this in the immediate way in which I know of the people whom I see by looking out of my window. It is not easy to state precisely wherein the difference between these two sorts of knowledge consists, but it is easy to feel the difference. For the moment, I shall not stop to analyse it, but shall content myself with saying that, in this respect, memory resembles the knowledge derived from the senses. It is immediate, not inferred, not abstract; it differs from perception mainly by being referred to the past.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"Memory", The Analysis of Mind