Memory Quotes - Page 17

And when suddenlythe god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry,uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ –she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?

And afterwards, if you had asked any of the survivors how they had managed it, they would not have been able to tell you. It was as if those days in the forest, the escape to the city, had passed in a trance. The mind creates an alternative state.

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

88% of what we call good songs aren’t really good. They merely remind us of a good time we once had.

I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

...but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty.

Who that has ever visited the borders of this classic sea, has not felt at the first sight of its waters a glow of reverent rapture akin to devotion, and an instinctive sensation of thanksgiving at being permitted to stand before these hallowed waves? All that concerns the Mediterranean is of the deepest interest to civilized man, for the history of its progress is the history of the development of the world; the memory of the great men who have lived and died around its banks; the recollection of the undying works that have come thence to delight us for ever; the story of patient research and brilliant discoveries connected with every physical phenomenon presented by its waves and currents, and with every order of creatures dwelling in and around its waters. The science of the Mediterranean is the epitome of the science of the world.

I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.

There is magic just outside our memory.

My students tag tables, walls, and chairs because their greatest fear is that no one will ever remember them. They do not believe they can give impassioned speeches, rally people in protest, paint masterpieces. They think they will die, small and forgotten, and it dictates their every action.

He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He'd put it in almost fifty years before and hadn't had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn't find it.

Three grey women walk with me Fate and Grief and Memory. My fate brought grief; my grief must be With me through Eternity, Such thy power, memory.Three grey women walk with me.

He was a prisoner to the calendar, he realised, as we all were. He thought in little boxes that were to be ticked off and filled with things to do. Almost every day he thought back to what he had been doing ten years ago, twenty years ago, further. He lived in the past, by his diary. He was a history man, his head full of dead leaves. It was a form of reassurance, he knew. There were too many roads into the future and he didn't like not having a map for it.("Wait")

Slavery is a memory of something we cannot remember, and yet we cannot forget.

I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.

Only Give up,When Your Hearts Gives up.(Don't Give up, till your Last Breath)

[M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.

Dissociation is characterized by a disruption of usually integrated functions of memory, consciousness, identity, or perception of the environment.

But seen through a long lens, peacemaking founded on 'forgetting' appears to have a limited lifespan.

Pegi just recorded "I Don't Want to Talk About," written by Danny Whitten, the original Crazy Horse guitar player and singer who's all over Early Daze, an album of songs from the beginning of Crazy Horse that I have been working on compiling recently. Danny was every bit the artist I am, but he died of a heroin OD in the early seventies. Every time I hear Pegi sing that song, it makes me tremendously sad. She sings it so beautifully, phrasing it to break my heart. She does it justice. You can see I have some unfinished business with Danny.

But it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and allowed my mind to relax entirely; then it would let go of the map of the place where I had fallen asleep and, when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was; all I had, in its original simplicity, was the sense of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal; I was more bereft than a caveman; but then the memory - not yet of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been - would come to me like help from on high to pull me out of the void from which I could not have got out on my own; I passed over centuries of civilization in one second, and the image confusedly glimpsed of oil lamps, then of wing-collar shirts, gradually recomposed my self's original features.

We want so badly to be happy – to live the kinds of lives that we always hoped we’d live – that we give gifts to ourselves by remembering things not as they were, but as we wish they were.

I’d never dreamed anybody could love me the way he did. And even when he proved it to me time and again – I still could hardly believe it was true.

If he closed his eyes he could dwell in the circuit of air that had once held her, he could hold his breath and be inside her again, within the close and burning borders of her- she stood here, washed her hair in this sink, wrote upon this wall, ate roasted chicken at this table. There was no place he could enter where she had not also been, her echoes hanging in the air like pages hung to dry. No place that did not suppurate in her absence, which was not ringed with the light of her old selves, like film burned with a cigarette.

An artist adopts a radically different view regarding the importance of time than a businessperson does. Instead of perceiving time as a merchantable facet doled out incrementally according to marketplace demands, an artist portrays time as an agent of destruction. The irrevocability of time frames the human condition. Time might the medium of all human experience, but its passage obscures and eventually obliterates all human endeavors. Time unchecked leads to a blank slate of nothingness. Time’s destructive march towards meaningless is arrested through memory and art depicting humankind’s struggles and accomplishments.

What is strange is that we may remember what we have done, but not always why we did it.

Touch has a memory. O say, love, say,What can I do to kill it and be free?

[“What is the most real thing you can think of?”]Jacques thought for a long time before answering; he tried to weigh up what was most vital and enduring in all that he had known. Eventually, no longer smiling, he said, ‘Memory’.

...the act of remembering is imagined as a real act, that is, as a physical act: as walking...the means of retrieving the stored information was walking through the rooms like a visitor in a museum...to walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though thoughts and ideas were indeed fixed objects in a landscape one need only know how to travel through. In this way, walking is reading, even when both the walking and reading are imaginary, and the landscape of the memory becomes a text as stable as that to be found in the garden, the labyrinth, or the stations.

CLEMENTINE: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon.JOEL: I know.CLEMENTINE: What do we do?JOEL: Enjoy it.

You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.

You can miss places. You can miss people.Just know that what you’re really missing is the way things were. And even if you could go there again…. see them again…. you can’t go back.They’re not the same.You’re not the same.The loss of them changed you.

A feeling struck me one fine day that people call ‘love’,Before that my life was empty, all I had was loneliness and sorrow…I loved the way it felt being with him, for I felt up above,Now everything was complete and nothing remained hollow…That person who cupid made me fall for, was a God descended from heavens,I loved him with all I had, a true heart and a pure soul…I thought I achieved the meaning of life, never did I felt so glad,But when he left me amidst a chaos, I had no one with me to console…I cried, it hurt, I wept and screamed, everyone called me ‘mad’,And still I wonder if in my life, that actually was his role…But a string still binds me to my past of untold vow,Some unsaid promises that linger between us even now,Although I don’t know where he went after that fateful day…I still try to convince myself every day, I know how,Each moment has been tough, each day a new challenge…Each hour passed as if it was my heart that always allowed,One more day to live without him, one more day to cherish…One more day to spend without the love of my life somehow,But he doesn’t know that one day, the girl herself would perish…Who loved him and lived each day of her life in his wait,For the man who never returned, for the man who wasn’t in her fate…

Though you forget the way to the Temple,There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not. You shall not deny the Stranger.

Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.

Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense.

...someone ought to invent a tool, a kind of plane to shave the lies away from stories and deception away from memories. I'm a collector of shavings.

Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture the additional act.

How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?

If I considered the Partition an archeological site, and the many experiences of those who witnessed it as the site’s structural sedimentation, then the deeper I excavated, the more I found, and that too in innumerable renditions.

Photography is never real, it’s merely one of many ways of telling the truth.

Sincerity and gravity, in Magnus's opinion, were highly overrated, as was being forced to relive unpleasant memories. He would much rather be amused and amusing.

Yesterday is but to-day’s memory and to-morrow is to-day’s dream.

That's the problem with memories: you can visit them but you can't live with them.

Nature never remembers, that’s why she’s beautiful.

Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things - landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people - that would otherwise have melted from my memory.

The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies.

She tried to remember all the times she had spoken to him. She replayed every moment she could remember at the beach last week. Not once had she led him to believe that she liked him improperly. And yet, last night, he had appeared as if she had invited him. She had given herself so willingly, so lasciviously, that he must have thought she had desired him all along. Perhaps she had, or perhaps she had not realised how pleasurable intimacy could be.

People usually will remember people most, for the stupid things they did, than the impressionable ones. This somehow strangely, makes them feel better.

The more emotional you are in a situation, the more memories you’ll have of that situation in the long run.

And friends abroad must bear in mindFriends at home they leave behind.Oh, I shall be stiff and coldWhen I forget you, hearts of gold;The land where I shall mind you notIs the land where all's forgot.And if my foot returns no moreTo Teme nor Corve nor Severn shore,Luck, my lads, be with you stillBy falling stream and standing hill,By chiming tower and whispering tree,Men that made a man of me.About your work in town and farmStill you'll keep my head from harm,Still you'll help me, hands that gaveA grasp to friend me to the grave.

There's nothing like a re-creation of the event. Which is lucky. Think if one could fully remember perfume or kisses! How wearisome the reality of them would be!

A chair can be more valuable in memories than, say, a precious gem. A gem could have no stories to share; no lives altered or changed in the slightest. It could remain buried beneath the earth for all we know and never have any memory to embody. A chair could transcend time and generations; from the people who sat in it and onlookers. It's all about considering what stories could be told if they had voices of their own.

If you work hard enough at something that doesn’t matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.

We must treasure our memories just as we cherish our dreams because without dreams and memory human life would be sad, brutal, and meaningless.

Of course she wants him to forget her. The last place she wants to reside is in his thoughts. What an unpleasant place to be.

It was clear that he didn't remember me from one day to the next. The note clipped to his sleeve simply informed him that it was not our first meeting, but it could not bring back the memory of the time we had spent together.

She couldn't put into words how desparately she wanted to know what had happened to Sarah. But she'd suddenly realized that Sarah was not the only one who had lost her memory of what happened when she was a little girl. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their memories of what had happened to them ...

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.