Memory Quotes
I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.
Rene Descartes
Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.
Edmund de Waal
It's easy to write one's memoirs when one has a terrible memory.
Arthur Schnitzler
Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.
Anna Funder
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
Memory is the scaffolding upon which all mental life is constructed.
Gerald Fischbach
We had our thing. It is a really good memory but now we're older. Things change.
Abbi Glines
Even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn't grasp...' There are the places in memory you do not wish to go with others.
Edmund de Waal
Everything up to and including Unknown Pleasures really existed only when the four of us were in a room together playing it. Not written down, not recorded, just from memory.
Peter Hook
New Order
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.
Jane Austen
Perhaps the potency of fever, of drugs, of alcohol, or of mania may open up deeps of memory, of primordial memory, that are closed to the milder magic of sleep. The subtle poison in the grape may gnaw through the walls of Time and give the memory sight of those terrible days when we wallowed — nameless shapes — in the primaeval slime.
Elizabeth Bisland
Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.
George Eliot
But sometimes what we call 'memory' and what we call 'imagination' are not so easily distinguished.
Leslie Marmon Silko
There are three signs of old age: loss of memory ... I forget the other two.
Red Skelton
Nobody is made anything by hearing of rules, or laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing, without reflecting on the rule; and you may as well hope to make a good painter, or musician, extempore, by a lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a coherent thinker, or a strict reasoner, by a set of rules, showing him wherein right reasoning consists.
John Locke
Nazareth
I think my interest gets sparked when I recognize a memory. That is when I take a picture.
Alex Majoli
Observation is an old man's memory.
Jonathan Swift
The sense organs, which are limited in scope and ability, randomly gather information. This partial information is arranged into judgments, which are based on previous judgments, which are usually based on someone else's foolish ideas. These false concepts and ideas are then stored in a highly selective memory system.
Lao Tzu
