MEMORY QUOTES IV

quotations about memory

Memory quote

Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn't mean that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not.

TOBIAS WOLFF

Continuum, summer 1998

Tags: Tobias Wolff


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

Tags: Marcel Proust


A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

STEPHEN KING

Duma Key

Tags: Stephen King


Remembrance wakes with all her busy train,
Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

The Deserted Village

Tags: Oliver Goldsmith


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

Tags: Diane F. Halpern


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

Tags: David Baldacci


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"

Tags: Anne S. Bushby


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

Tags: Sarah Dessen


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

Tags: St. Augustine


You can't run away from memories, no matter how hard you try.

JOHN SAUL

Midnight Voices

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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


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

Tags: Frank Herbert


Memory is never pure. And recollection is always coloured by the life lived since.

JOSEPHINE HART

Sin

Tags: Josephine Hart


Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

CYRIL CONNOLLY

The Unquiet Grave

Tags: Cyril Connolly


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


Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart.

HARUKI MURAKAMI

Kafka on the Shore

Tags: Haruki Murakami


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

Tags: Martin Farquhar Tupper


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


But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.

JULIAN BARNES

Talking It Over

Tags: Julian Barnes


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

Tags: Bertrand Russell