Memory Quotes
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Practicing mindfulness calms down the sympathetic nervous system, so that you are less likely to be thrown into fight-or-flight.11 Learning to observe and tolerate your physical reactions is a prerequisite for safely revisiting the past. If you cannot tolerate what you are feeling right now, opening up the past will only compound the misery and retraumatize you further.12 We can tolerate a great deal of discomfort as long as we stay conscious of the fact that the body’s commotions constantly shift. One moment your chest tightens, but after you take a deep breath and exhale, that feeling softens and you may observe something else, perhaps a tension in your shoulder. Now you can start exploring what happens when you take a deeper breath and notice how your rib cage expands.13 Once you feel calmer and more curious, you can go back to that sensation in your shoulder. You should not be surprised if a memory spontaneously arises in which that shoulder was somehow involved.
Bessel van der Kolk
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If the will, which in the law of our nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason, no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel from the anarchy of our powers. It would be conscious madness,--a horrid thought!
John Milton
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Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.
Erica Jong
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Dissociation prevents the trauma from becoming integrated within the conglomerated, ever-shifting stores of autobiographical memory, in essence creating a dual memory system. Normal memory integrates the elements of each experience into the continuous flow of self-experience by a complex process of association; think of a dense but flexible network where each element exerts a subtle influence on many others. But in Julian’s case, the sensations, thoughts, and emotions of the trauma were stored separately as frozen, barely comprehensible fragments.
Bessel van der Kolk
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I’m not just taking trips down memory lane; I’m broken down on it.
Pete Wentz
Fall Out Boy
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Washington, D.C., is not a subtle city. Unlike the capitals of other once-great powers which, many hundreds of years old, present a more seamless meshing of monumental memory and daily life, D.C. is constructed to shout, 'Here I am! I am powerful!' to the world.
Uzodinma Iweala
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The afternoon is bright, with spring in the air, a mild March afternoon, with the breath of April stirring, I am alone in the quiet patio looking for some old untried illusion - some shadow on the whiteness of the wall some memory asleep on the stone rim of the fountain, perhaps in the air the light swish of some trailing gown.
Antonio Machado
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The gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue, but of life. It cannot be grasped by reason and memory only, but it is fully understood when it possesses the whole soul and penetrates to the inner recesses of the heart.
John Calvin
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Many 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.
Elizabeth Loftus
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Only powerfully conceived images have the ability to penetrate the memory, to stay there, in short to become unforgettable.
Brassaï
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I feel like I've had a lot of painful situations that I intentionally delete from my memory.
Nancy Wilson
Heart
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The difference between being good, very good and exceptional as a cook is in having the flavours in your memory.
Alex Atala
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I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can't even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk.
Franz Kafka
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Our study showed that the false memory and the genuine memory are based on very similar, almost identical, brain mechanisms. It is difficult for the false memory bearer to distinguish between them.
Susumu Tonegawa
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Say whatever your memory suggests is true; but add nothing and exaggerate nothing.
Charlotte Bronte
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In teaching, regard must be had to the faculties possessed by the pupil. In childhood, memory; in youth, the understanding; in mature life, the reason is the predominating faculty.
Joseph P. Bradley
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I never encourage deceit, and falsehood, especially if you have got a bad memory, is the worst enemy a fellow can have. The fact is truth is your truest friend, no matter what the circumstances are.
Abraham Lincoln
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When I was born I was given a choice. To be astoundingly cute or to have a great memory.
Sanha
Astro
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According to the most outspoken and vituperative Skeptics, therapists specializing in recovered memory therapy operate in a neverland of fairy dust and mythic monsters. Woefully out of touch with modern research, engaging in “crude psychiatric analysis,” guilty of oversimplification, overextension, and “incestuous opinion citing,” these misguided, undertrained, and overzealous clinicians are implanting false memories in the minds of suggestible clients, making “therapeutic lifers” out of their patients and ripping families apart.
Elizabeth Loftus
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In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
Edgar Allan Poe
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Rather I fear on the contrary that while we banish painful thoughts we may banish memory as well.
Plutarch
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But sometimes what we call 'memory' and what we call 'imagination' are not so easily distinguished.
Leslie Marmon Silko
