Quotes on Memories

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.

The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. (pg. 326, The Pleasures of Eating)

Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.

The first step in the acquisition of wisdom is silence, the second listening, the third memory, the fourth practice, the fifth teaching others.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.

Nothing is forgotten in the processes of idealization. Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him.

I don't regret any of the places I went in football. Everything gave me an experience or memories that I'll have forever. We had more success in San Francisco, but it was a great time everywhere. I always had fun.

When a match has equal partners then I fear not.

Sweet is the memory of distant friends! Like the mellow rays of the departing sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart.

But I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time—love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.

Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.

Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them.

My selective memory of what drinking was like told me that standing at the bar in a pub, on a summer's evening with a long, tall glass of lager and lime was heaven, and I chose not to remember the nights on which I had sat with a bottle of vodka, a gram of coke and a shotgun, contemplating suicide.

Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.

Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting most of what I have learned or read. Since then, I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without. (...) I have stored little in my memory, but I can apply that little, and it is of use in many and varied emergencies. I keep it in order, but resist every attempt to increase its dead weight.