Quotes on Memories

Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.

This grant gave me more than memories; it gave me a crucial experience that is formative to all writers: the ability to perceive that we become writers in exile, where what we write is the only link across distance and time…I became a Maryland writer because the community of Juneau took me in.

If we live out of our memory, we're tied to the past and to that which is finite. When we live out of our imagination, _x000D_ we're tied to that which is infinite.

A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works.

When you can't remember why you're hurt, that's when you're healed.

Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.

I'm leaving my sorrows and all my memories behind to see what I find, somewhere in the shade near the sound of a sweet singing river, somewhere in the sun where the mountains make love to the sky.

To create worry humans elongate fear with anticipation and memory, expand it in imagination and fuel it with emotion. The uniquely human mental process called worrying depends upon having a brain that can reason, remember, reflect, feel, and imagine. Only humans have a brain big enough to do this simultaneously and do it well.

With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don't think it's human to become an agent of the angel of death.

And I began to feel sorry for myself; for so many years, my drawer full of memories had held the same old stories.

We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.

Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.

I don't think I'll ever act again. I have so many wonderful memories, but those days are over.

Memory cuts both ways; it can either provide you with tremendous strength and a foundation to carry you through your life, or it can be a demon that just ruins your present and your future because you can’t let go of the past.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.

I cannot speculate on what our cluttered mind will save- sleepy Sundays, or a nosebleed after love. I know only the dying heart needs the nourishment of memory to live beyond too many winters.

Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.

You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper.

Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins.