Memory Quotes - Page 34

My survival was up to me. I had nothing and I had no one. What I did have, I told myself, was my mind, my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. These were important and powerful things.

I think people would be happier if they admitted things more often. In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment - we are all defined by something we can’t change.

This seems to have been St. Augustine's very notion of "memory," not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing.

The human mind was a devious organ, however, and it chiseled in stone that which would be best left unrecalled.

You broke the chain, Luna. Of all his victims, you were the only one that ever walked away and he hasn’t forgotten.

I don't believe everything happens for a reason. But I still search for reasons anyway. It's like I don't want to admit that maybe everything really is totally random...that people are just molecules in the air, bumping into each other and floating away again."-p150, NOTES TO SELF

I fear it is my lot, to bide my days in hunchbacked thought, to find what I forgot.

Even in forgetting there is an aspect of recollection, a faded few moments of wispy consciousness clung like webs in high-vaulted chambers, moving ever so lightly with the draft.

How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.

This I have known, and these have come againWith echoing happiness in heart and brain;Time standing still, surrendering to meBeauty that otherwise would cease to be.

Our experiences and our memories are within us, and the key is to be aware of the lens or the filter, to realise that we can also change the angle, especially when we are feeling agitated or stuck in life, that we can change the record.

I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try and call on it, just like a light bulb cracking off when you throw the switch.

Only a sentimental being would care about such everyday things—things used and discarded by the humans of their respective eras without thought, yet kept and preserved by an immortal who never forgot them. An immortal who loved and cared for them, dusting them off for an eternity, keeping their dead spirits as alive as he—stuck in their immortal tomb never to find the rest everything must eventually seek. Time had no meaning in this cavern of infinite age.

I feel as if I had opened a book and found roses of yesterday sweet and fragrant, between its leaves.

A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur.

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

Finallya day will come whenwoken by the xylophoneof sunthroughblindsyou’ll realisethat the beach was not the placewhere horses tore the sandto ribbonthat the scent of him has liftedfrom the last of the sheetsthat he isn’t coming backthat it hasn’t rainedbut the birds are pretending that it hasso they can sing

We can free ourselves from the old stories that have reduced us & allow real love for ourselves to blossom.

Experiences that we remember intrusively, despite desperately wanting to banish them from our minds, are closely linked to, and sometimes threaten, our perceptions of who we are and who we would like to be.

You know some minutes warn you they're going to be mighty short and you'd better take a snapshot of 'em while you can. ("Golden Baby")

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.

My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance--this is why people tell me secrets--my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is ever lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound.

How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at age thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.Honda felt that his youth had ended with the death of Kiyoaki Matsugae. At that moment something real within him, something that had burned with a vibrant brilliance, suddenly ceased to be.Now, late at night, when Honda grew weary of his legal drafts, he would pick up the dream journal that Kiyoaki had left him and turn over its pages.(...)Since then eighteen years had passed. The border between dream and memory had grown indistinct in Honda’s mind. Because the words contained in this journal, his only souvenir of his friend, had been traced there by Kiyoaki’s own hand, it had profound significance for Honda. These dreams, left like a handful of gold dust in a winnowing pan, were charged with wonder.As time went by, the dreams and the reality took on equal worth among Honda’s diverse memories. What had actually occurred was in the process of merging with what could have occurred. As reality rapidly gave way to dreams, the past seemed very much like the future.When he was young, there had been only one reality, and the future had seemed to stretch before him, swelling with immense possibilities. But as he grew older, reality seemed to take many forms, and it was the past that seemed refracted into innumerable possibilities. Since each of these was linked with its own reality, the line distinguishing dream and reality became all the more obscure. His memories were in constant flux, and had taken on the aspect of a dream.

He was already fading. I knew that it wouldn't be long until he was just a vague image, however much I tried to cling onto his memory.

Life, he knew, had meaning and was fully possessed only as it was remembered and reshaped.

I'd been feeling like this for a while, the continual looking back, the stuckness of it all. I blamed it on the coming New Year, only four and a half months away, when the clocks would read zero and we would start again, could start again, but I knew we wouldn't. Nothing would. The world would be the same, just a little bit worse.

Every key belongs to a lock, and every lock contains a secret. My mind churns for the truth that you hold. Why are you here? I never desired this for you, yet I am curious to know. Is this idle gaud the answer I seek, or is it merely the old memory of a dream I thought I once lived?

Not the slow Hearse, where nod the sable plumes,     The Parian Statue, bending o'er the Urn,     The dark robe floating, the dejection worn     On the dropt eye, and lip no smile illumes; Not all this pomp of sorrow, that presumes     It pays Affection's debt, is due concern     To the FOR EVER ABSENT, tho' it mournFashion's allotted time. If Time consumes, While Life is ours, the precious vestal-flame     Memory shou'd hourly feed;—if, thro' each day,     She with whate'er we see, hear, think, or say, Blend not the image of the vanish'd Frame,     O! can the alien Heart expect to prove, In worlds of light and life, a reunited love!

There were times when I lifted my face to the sky, stretched my arms wide to the winter night, and laughed out loud, so happy was I.The memory of it makes me laugh now, but not from happiness.Be careful what you show the world.You never know when the wolf is watching.

The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.

No one really remembers anything five minutes after it happens.

Somehow your heart still knows me.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.

They say that wisdom comes from suffering. This is not true. Wisdom comes from having unconditional empathy for all mankind. Any man filled with empathy is capable of gaining valuable insights on the human condition through the suffering of others. You do not need to suffer to know suffering, but you need empathy first to identify and feel the suffering of others around you. If you do not feel love for all mankind, nor see everyone around you as a valuable human and an extension of yourself, then you will never feel real empathy. And if you do not have empathy, then you will not gain, learn and remember valuable knowledge from your experiences, or those around you, so that you one day become wise. Yet most importantly, wisdom comes from having a good memory. If you do not remember anything, or are so disconnected from basic humanism to even care to dissect lessons to be gained from every experience in your life and from those around you - using simple reason and the juggling of feelings, then wisdom will forever remain a faraway planet to you.

He’s completely blown through his younger years like his childhood was one big cigarette to smoke carelessly.

The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.

When you can see your life in retrospect, the romanticism of how good things once were gives way to the reality that positives and negatives comprise every day and every decade. (235)

And like an aviator who rolls painfully along the ground until, abruptly, he breaks away from it, I felt myself being slowly lifted towards the silent peaks of memory.

I would have no need for the Memory Of Things past if those which were Present were more agreeable

We only reach true wisdom when we accept that we have almost certainly forgotten more than we currently remember.

The last slide is Main Street at night, with the castle lit silver blue in the background. In the sky, fireworks are going off, cresting, cracking open the darkness, shooting long tendrils of colored light down to the buildings, way longer than I’ve ever seen for fireworks… I linger on this slide. I study that blue castle and those fireworks and realize that this is the image I’ve had in my head of Disneyland for all these years. Just like the beginning of the Wonderful World of Disney TV show. Maybe that’s why I wanted to head here this time. I know it’s ridiculous, but part of me wants to think that the world after this one could look like that.Like I said before, I stopped having notions about religion and heaven long ago—angels and harps and clouds and all that malarkey. Yet some silly, childish side of me still wants to believe in something like this. A gleaming world of energy and light, where nothing is quite the same color as it is on earth—everything bluer, greener, redder. Or maybe we just become the colors, that light spilling from the sky over the castle. Perhaps it would be somewhere we’ve already been, the place we were before we were born, so dying is simply a return. I guess is that were true then somehow we’d remember it. Maybe that’s what I’m doing with this whole trip—looking for somewhere that I remember, deep in some crevice of my soul. Who knows? Maybe Disneyland is heaven. Isn’t that the damnedest, craziest thing you’ve ever heard? Must be the dope talking.(pp.253-254)

The feelings that still linger, decade after decade, aren’t just the residue of a love lost. They are as real as the first day I told her I loved her." ~Corbin Jones, Voice of Innocence

My black-headed black-eyed boy. I remember every day of you. How would I forget?

25. Whenever two human beings spend time together, sooner or later they will probably irritate one another. This is true of best friends, married couples, parents and children, or teachers and students. The question is: How do they respond when friction occurs? There are four basic ways they can react:•tThey can internalize the anger and send it downward into a memory bank that never forgets. This creates great pressure within and can even result in disease and other problems.•tThey can pout and be rude without discussing the issues. This further irritates the other person and leaves him or her to draw his or her own conclusions about what the problem may be.•tThey can blow up and try to hurt the other person. This causes the death of friendships, marriages, homes, and businesses.•tOr they can talk to one another about their feelings, being very careful not to attack the dignity and worth of the other person. This approach often leads to permanent and healthy relationships.

Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary

Mearth appeared angry and disappointed briefly, but then she just gazed at the ground. “…It must be horrible, feeling all alone, is it?” she asked.“Oh, not really,” said Alecto, his eyes lifeless, his voice listless. “I’m going to be forgotten by someone who I can’t forget, though. That will be terrible… but maybe it’s better if she does forget me altogether.

Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone.

[Memory]... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense....Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world.

Putting the past behind you isn't like stuffing something in the back of a drawer or trimming a loose thread. The past has a life of its own.

As she stooped over him, her tears fell upon his forehead.The boy stirred, and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and affection he had never known; as a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or even the mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes that never were, in this life; which vanish like a breath; and which some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have awakened, for no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall them.

What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?

War soaks into your bones, drills down into the marrow like a parasite. It blots your life like ink spilled on snow white paper, and it has its perils even long after you've given it up.

But I remember the place with fondness ... not perfect but, all in all, not a bad memory.

What happened to us? It was a question that interested her. Most people seemed to believe that they were experts of their own life story. They had a set of memories that they strung like beads, and this necklace told a sensible tale. But she suspected that most of these stories would fall apart under strict examination--that, in fact, we were only peeping through a keyhole of our lives, and the majority of the truth, the reality of what happened to us, was hidden. Memories were no more solid than dreams...What happened to us? She drew smoke, considering the question. Was it possible that we would never really know? What if we were not, actually, the curators of our own lives?

I had someone once who made every day mean something.And now…. I am lost….And nothing means anything anymore.

Because with time blocking out the bad, memory is always bound to be a bit naive and stupidly optimistic.

She wondered if old dreams could haunt rooms - if, when one left forever the room where she had joyed and suffered and laughed and wept, something of her, intangible and invisible, yet nonetheless real, did not remain behind like a voiceful memory.

The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciouness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep. Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event. Thus, even normally safe environments may come to feel dangerous, for the survivor can never be assured that she will not encounter some reminder of the trauma.

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.