Quotes about memory

The nasty thing about the availability bias is that it insidiously distorts our view of the world by distorting our perception of past events and our environment.

Reflected here is life as I lived it, my thoughts and feelings as I remember them. Here, too, are my personal exchanges with others. IN reconstructing them, I have relied on my knowledge of opinions held, and my recollection of articulated events.

Memory seems a fragile spirit. It may be a river of reality that fathers dreams and desires and change in its flow. Nevertheless, I have tried to be faithful to both fact and feeling.

Ghosts? Pah. We are the most substantial things in the world, the foundations of the present. We are memories.

“Hey!” the people cried in their dreams. “Give us back our ghosts!” for ghosts are as much a part of a community as its plumbing or its library, for how can a community be without its memories?

At least within our own consciousness, the past is malleable and flexible, constantly changing as our recollection reinterprets and re-explains what has happened.

Only a fool loves war. Or a man who has never seen it. The trouble is that the survivors forget about the horrors and remember only the battle lust. They pass on that memory, and other men hunger for it.

The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.

There's much more. There's all that goes beyond—all that is Elsewhere—and all that goes back, and back, and back. I received all of those, when I was selected. And here in this room, all alone, I re-experience them again and again. It is how wisdom comes. And how we shape our future.

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.

I could not find my way back in dreams, I knew then. They were memory and desire, terror and hope; they told me only what I already knew.

The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.

Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I'm a mix-tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.