Quotes about memory

But she had no memory of how to be brave. Here, it seemed, she had no memories at all. Nothing triggered them. And once in a while, when shegave voice to the fleeting edge of one, it seemed like something she was making up.

I suspect that significant first encounters only take on their aura of significance in retrospect.

I was pondering the question, which I have pondered before, of whether such great revelatory moments really so occur, or if it is only that, out of need, our lives so lacking in drama, we invest past events with a significance they do not warrant.

Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don't go along with that. The memories I value most, I don't see them ever fading.

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

Can I remember— “I remember lots,” I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.

Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.

Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is prone to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms.

As a man grows older the memory of his youth begins to act as nothing less than an immunization against further experience. And he was thirty-eight. It was an age when one felt strangely unready to say that one had lived and yet reluctant to acknowledge the death of youth. An age when the savor of one’s experiences turned ever so slightly sour, and when, day by day, one took less pleasure in new things. An age when the charm of every diverting foolishness quickly faded.

The years of childhood...My memory runs head-on into a scene that is like a symbol of those years. To me as I am today, that scene represents childhood itself, past and irrecoverable.When I saw the scene I felt the hand of farewell with which childhood would take its leave of me. I had a premonition at that instant that all my feeling of subjective time, or timelessness, might one day gush forth from within me and flood into the mold of that scene, to become an exact imitation of its people and movements and sounds; that simultaneous with the completion of this copy, the original might melt away into the distant perspectives of real and objective time;and that I might be left with nothing more than the mere imitation or, to say it another way, with nothing more than an accurately stuffed specimen of my childhood.

We are largely the sum of all we’ve done, and to dispose of that knowledge would be to stop being one’s self.

Remember, my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker.