Quotes on Memory

It is curious to note how fragile the memory is, even for the important times in one's life. This is, moreover, what explains the fortunate fantasy of history.

Many think of memory as rote learning, a linear stuffing of the brain with facts, where understanding is irrelevant. When you teach it properly, with imagination and association, understanding becomes a part of it.

A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like to be inside a human skin.

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.

I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time.

Performance is there, and if you are not there in that moment it happened, it just stays in the memory. It's so immaterial and something this immaterial is very difficult to collect. Its difficult to buy, its how we can buy immaterial art.

Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.

I don't know if I have a memory of not thinking I was a writer - it goes that far back. I went to law school because I didn't know how to earn a living otherwise. I tried to ignore the pull, but it wouldn't let me.

Karma, memory, and desire are just the software of the soul. It's conditioning that the soul undergoes in order to create experience. And it's a cycle. In most people, the cycle is a conditioned response. They do the same things over and over again.

The first memory I have in the world is of death and tears. That is how I would mark the beginning of my life: the way people mark the end of one. My family had gathered at Papa Joe's house because Mam' Grace was slipping away, only I didn't register it that way. For some reason I thought that it was her birthday.

In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; there's a great deal of memory in them.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

I remember tearing up the first time I read Nabokov's description, in 'Speak, Memory,' of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering muzhiks, with its astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning.

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.