Memory Quotes

• Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

  

  Walter Benjamin
  • Experience
  • Past
  • Theatre

• You should keep in mind no names, nor numbers, nor isolated incidents, not even results, but only methods..The method produces numerous results; a few of these will remain in our memory, and as long as they remain few, they are useful to illustrate and to keep alive the rules which order a thousand results.

  

  Emanuel Lasker
  • Results
  • Names
  • Incidents

• How come I love having an episode of deja vu? It's akin to an out-of-body experience, I would think. It sits with me, happily, begging me to delve into my memory to find its match point.

  

  Rachel Nichols
  • Love
  • Experience
  • Memory

• Memory in Greek mythology is the mother of the muses, and it is so for me. Both personal and societal memory move me strongly, and that is one of the sources of my writing.

  

  Marge Piercy
  • Writing
  • Mother
  • Greek

• Cinema is a little over 100 years old, and a lot of what we do is built around film emulsion. Those things were calibrated for white skin. We've always placed powder on skin to dull the light. But my memory of growing up in Miami is this moist, beautiful black skin.

  

  Barry Jenkins
  • Up
  • Beautiful
  • Black

• We burn the evil men do with their mortal remains. We treasure the memory of the good they do, and distance magnifies it.

  

  Mahatma Gandhi
  • Evil
  • Memory
  • Magnifies

• Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world.

  

  David Lewis-Williams
  • Dreams
  • Recollection
  • Long-term

• There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).

  

  Daniel Dennett
  • Reality
  • Action
  • Independent

• The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

  

  Umberto Eco
  • Life
  • Sick
  • Memory

• The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the angels of our nature.

  

  Abraham Lincoln
  • Heart
  • Nature
  • Memory

• With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

  

  George Eliot
  • History
  • Shame
  • Wound

• I have lost my short-term memory - I'm just getting blonder by the day.

  

  Rachel Zoe
  • Lost
  • Day
  • Memory

• It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.

  

  Arthur Schopenhauer
  • Memory
  • Good Time
  • Good Days

• The muscle memory of filtering away all the wrong versions of what you're doing improves the more time you're on a film set. I feel like my problem-solving algorithm got kicked up a notch.

  

  Brad Soderberg
  • Problem
  • Algorithms
  • Improves

• He may live in my memory as the most amiable man of my acquaintance.

  

  Jane Austen
  • Live
  • Man
  • Acquaintance

• He held her face in his hands, and stared into her eyes, and said that she was his for only a while anyway, and that it wasn’t his going to Cranwell that would split them up. “You’re destined for greater things, Susannah Hammond. I see it in you. You’re so clever, so bright. So beautiful. So special. I’m not any of those things. Except when I’m flying, maybe. Down here, I’m ordinary. I’m going to be just a memory for you. A sweet one, I hope. Happy. But just a part of your past. I might be good enough for now, but I’m not good enough forever. Not for you.

  

  Elizabeth Noble
  • Forever
  • Hands
  • I Hope

• I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

  

  Damon Galgut
  • People
  • Up
  • Growing

• Thanks to Twitter, iPads, BlackBerrys, voice-activated in-dash navigation systems, and a hundred other technologies that offer distraction anywhere, anytime, boredom has loosened its grip on us at last - that once-crushing 'weight' has become, for the most part, a memory.

  

  Walter Kirn
  • Memory
  • Thanks
  • Boredom

• The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

  

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • Good
  • Heart
  • Bad

• I must have good genes from my parents because I feel no slowdown of energy, enthusiasm or even memory.

  

  Nancy Pelosi
  • Good
  • Parents
  • Energy

• Like all things, cities must change - even a city as enamoured of the past and memory as D.C.

  

  Uzodinma Iweala
  • Change
  • City
  • Memory

• In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.

  

  Anne Bogart
  • Literature
  • Theatre
  • Memory

• I had long since realized that each of us organizes memory as it suits him, I'm still surprised when I do it myself. But it surprised me that one could go so far as to give the facts an arrangement that went against one's own interests.

  

  Elena Ferrante
  • Interests
  • Surprised
  • Arrangement

• The first generations of Comanches in captivity never really understood the concept of wealth, of private property. The central truth of their lives was the past, the dimming memory of the wild, ecstatic freedom of the plains, of the days when Comanche warriors in black buffalo headdresses rode unchallenged from Kansas to northern Mexico, of a world without property or boundaries. What Quanah had that the rest of his tribe in the later years did not was that most American of human traits: boundless optimism.

  

  S. C. Gwynne
  • World
  • Truth
  • American

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