Top 100 What Is Memory Quotes
#1. What is memory but a story about how we have lived?
Mark Doty
#2. But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously ...
Julio Cortazar
#4. Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface.
Ron Rash
#6. What is memory foam? How does it remember things? Does it have its own brain?" Edilyn
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you. Suffice it to say, it's something future man will thank modern science for. There's also a toilet in the bathroom." Virag
"A what in the who?" Edilyn
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#7. I have begun to wonder what actually happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?
Siri Hustvedt
#8. In order to be an image of God, the spirit must turn to what is eternal, hold it in spirit, keep it in memory, and by loving it, embrace it in the will.
Edith Stein
#9. Forgetting who you are is so much more complicated than simply forgetting your name. It's also forgetting your dreams. Your aspirations. What makes you happy. What you pray you'll never have to live without. It's meeting yourself for the first time, and not being sure of your first impression.
Jessica Brody
#10. In general, the heart seems to have a more reliable memory for what benefits the psyche than does the head, which has a rather unhealthy tendeny to lead an 'abstract' existence, and easily forgets that its consciousness is snuffed out the moment the heart fails its duty.
C. G. Jung
#11. There is no possibility of remembering what has been found and understood, and later repeating it to oneself. It disappears as a dream disappears. Perhaps it is all nothing but a dream.
P.D. Ouspensky
#12. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.
Margaret Atwood
#13. Sometimes living with memory, with the thought of what friends, those who shared your soul and dreams, will do to you is worse than taking a bullet or having someone stab your flesh. There is a way of bleeding from one's soul.
Megan McKenna
#14. The thing is, you never know what tiny event might become a potent memory, lingering in your mind, taking on more and more significance with each passing year.
Seth
#15. Terror - what Hunter Thompson calls "fear and loathing" - often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking. If that sense of unmaking is sudden and seems personal - if it hits you around the heart - then it lodges in the memory as a complete set.
Stephen King
#16. Does a sick society get so used to its illness that it can't remember being well? what if the memory is too dangerous for the people who like things the way they are?
Neal Shusterman
#17. What we call expertise is really just "vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain." In other words, a great memory isn't just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.
Joshua Foer
#18. Music is the language of some other state, born of memory. For what can wake the soul's strong instinct of some other world like music?
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#19. There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost.
Claire North
#20. Open thy mind; take in what I explain and keep it there; because to understand is not to know, if thou dost not retain...
Dante Alighieri
#21. If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.
Julian Barnes
#22. Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.
Anna Funder
#24. Memory is both the curse of grief and the eventual talisman against it; what at first seems unbearable becomes the succor that can outlast pain.
Gail Caldwell
#25. What makes and experience a memory is when we share with someone, the emotions we felt
Jeremy Aldana
#26. And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness.
Haruki Murakami
#27. I scrub the memory from my mind. There is no past. There is no future. Love, if that's what it is, is as short as it is eternal.
Chloe Thurlow
#28. We read scripture in order to be refreshed in our memory and understanding of the story within which we ourselves are actors, to be reminded where it has come from and where it is going to, and hence what our own part within it ought to be.
N. T. Wright
#29. To know is not too demanding: it merely requires memory and time. But to understand is quite a different matter: it requires intellectual ability and training, a self conscious awareness of what one is doing, experience in techniques of analysis and synthesis, and above all, perspective.
Carroll Quigley
#30. My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don't make anything up. This may be a very Protestant notion, and I'm aware of the fact that memory is fallible, that if I had access to films or some absolute documentary evidence of what happened, it might look different; we get confused and fuzzy.
Siri Hustvedt
#31. As long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.
Marguerite Duras
#32. This is what I know: memory is the same as water. It permeates and saturates. Quenches and satiates. It can hold you up or pull you under; render you weightless or drown you. It is tangible, but elusive.
T. Greenwood
#33. You're bigger than I remember," she said stupidly.
"You too," he said. "I also remember that you were beautiful."
"Memory does play tricks on us."
"No. Your face is the same, but I don't remember what beautiful means anymore. Come on. Let's go out into the lake.
Orson Scott Card
#34. There is a part of everything which is unexplored,
because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.
Guy De Maupassant
#35. What's the difference? You ask me
The difference is, a smile touches my lips
When I remember both the memory of you entering my life
And the memory of you leaving my life
Tammy-Louise Wilkins
#36. [ ... ]my memory is reasonably good - unlike yours, dear sir!"
"Mine is erratic," he said imperturbably. "I remember only what interests me.
Georgette Heyer
#37. When you don't grasp something or remember something, I think your mind at last says, "Okay," and part of it accepts this. In the end your mind gets to welcome that deadening. that's what I believe anyway. Half of our memoryloss is by choice.
Anna Smaill
#38. It is strange how the memory of a man may float to posterity on what he would have himself regarded as the most trifling of his works.
William Osler
#39. The black-and-white figures of the photographs have had to stand in place of my memory and yet I have always felt that their unmarked graves became a part of me. What was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself.
Siri Hustvedt
#40. There is something out of gear about graded schools and all that. Memory is developed at the expense of what in general we are pleased to call thought and character.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#41. Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.
Elizabeth Bowen
#42. Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention? Is the Internet a kind of temporal gyre, sucking up stories, like geodrift, into its orbit? What is its gyre memory? How do we measure the half-life of its drift?
Ruth Ozeki
#43. Memory is like all other human powers, with which no man can be satisfied who measures them by what he can conceive, or by what he can desire.
Samuel Johnson
#44. The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man's memory. That is our duty. If we don't fulfill it, we feel unhappy.
Jorge Luis Borges
#45. ... That's what a map is, you know. Just a memory. Just a wish to go back home - someday, somehow. ...
Catherynne M Valente
#46. To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to live the life of a child forever. For what is a man's life, unless woven into the life of our ancestors by the memory of past deeds?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#47. In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, Virginia Vidaura said, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough.
Richard K. Morgan
#48. Talent like Michael's is rare. I feel so privileged to have known him and so look forward to honouring his memory in what is going to be the biggest and only tribute to this great showman.
Gladys Knight
#49. Crave the small, tactile simplicity of my new Kindle Paperwhite in its purple leather cover, which is currently home to what would make up around three boxes of physical books, but whose screen's digital imprint is flattened of all memory and association. It's soulless and almost weightless.
Linda Grant
#50. Photography is thus brought within reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees ... and enables the fortunate possessor to go back by the light of his own fireside to scenes which would otherwise fade from memory and be lost.
George Eastman
#51. Home isn't a place, Cassie.' The memory crept up on me. 'Home is the people who love you most, the people who will always love you, forever and ever, no matter what.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#52. One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything that makes others happy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#53. History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue.
Anne Michaels
#54. My memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
#55. What a mouse he is made by conversation,' " Ezri recited. " 'Scorns gods, dares battle, and flinches from a maid's rebuke! Merest laugh from merest girl is like a dagger felt, and like a dagger, makes a lodging of his breast. Turns blood to milkwater and courage to faint memory.'
Scott Lynch
#56. Memory is the mother of the muses, prototype Artist. As a rule picks and highlights what is important, omitting what is accidental or trivial. Occasionally, however, is mistaken as all the other artists. Nevertheless it is what I take as a guide page.
Frank Harris
#57. We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.
Daniel Kahneman
#58. I can understand that memory must be selective, else it would choke on the glut of experience. What I cannot understand is why it selects what it does.
Virgilia Peterson
#59. Power politics existed before Machiavelli was ever heard of; it will exist long after his name is only a faint memory. What he did, like Harvey, was to recognize its existence and subject it to scientific study.
Max Lerner
#60. People say life is short.
life's not short - it's long.
the memory of a human being: that's what's short.
Julio Alexi Genao
#61. There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.
Colum McCann
#62. Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.
Maurice Baring
#63. We may not realize it, but every point during the passage of our lives is a point of no return -- except for what memory permits.
Norman Lock
#64. What isn't remembered never happened.
Memory is merely a record...you just need to rewrite that record.
Yoshitoshi ABe
#65. Time is hastening on, and we
What our fathers are shall be,
Shadow-shapes of memory!
Joined to that vast multitude
Where the great are but the good.
John Greenleaf Whittier
#66. For that woe is past,' said Galadriel; 'and I would take what joy is here left, untroubled by memory. And maybe there is woe enough yet to come, though still hope may seem bright.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#67. Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.
Amy Bloom
#68. If you are free from memory and imagination, you will always be meditative.
If you release yourself from these, meditation is just natural. When you sit for meditation, what is your basic problem? You are either thinking about tomorrow or thinking about what happened yesterday
Sadhguru
#69. By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.
Wallace Stegner
#70. My true glory is not to have won 40 battles ... Waterloo will erase the memory of so many victories, ... But ... what will live forever, is my Civil Code.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#71. My earliest memory is my mom picking me up after I had fallen down, giving me a big hug and reading me 'Goodnight Moon.' From that moment, to this one, every single memory I have of my mom is that regardless of what was happening in her life, she was always, always there for me.
Chelsea Clinton
#72. Memory,' wrote the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, is a process of organizing what to forget.
Ben Ehrenreich
#73. What you possess is not what you jingle in the pockets of your memory, but the imaginings with which you fill the spaces of the future.
Elizabeth Bibesco
#74. You know what a storyteller is, don't you? It's a person that has a good memory who hopes other people don't.
Sandra Dallas
#75. Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.
Isabel Allende
#76. Memory is fragile and capricious; each of us remembers and forgets according to what is convenient. The past is a notebook with many leaves on which we jot down our lives with ink that changes according to our state of mind.
Isabel Allende
#77. What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.
Don DeLillo
#78. Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn't go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn't ever do it twice.
Michael Lewis
#79. All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.
Daniel Kahneman
#80. To learn is to incur surprise-I mean really learning, not just refreshing our memory or adding a new fact. And to invent is to bestow surprise-I mean really inventing, not just innovating what others have done.
John H. Lienhard
#81. She leans into the memory. She stares. She concentrates. What IS it that's she's looking for, trying to get straight at last?
Vivian Gornick
#82. What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.
Alfred North Whitehead
#83. I don't know what imagination is, if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory.
Christina Stead
#84. Beauty exists not in what is seen and remembered, but in what is felt and never forgotten.
Johnathan Jena
#85. Hey, if you can't remember, don't worry about it. I'm having a few memory problems myself in this place. Little things like how long I've been here, what my purpose in life is, which feet to put my shoes on. Stuff like that.
Eoin Colfer
#86. We're animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it's what binds us as human beings.
Terry Tempest Williams
#87. What the world is like from a nine-year-old's point of view? My memory is that nothing is explained to you, you've got to try to figure it out, pick up clues from the people around you, try to figure it out from their reactions.
Spike Jonze
#88. What it is
is the memory of a dance
a song you heard long ago
to hear it is to be young again
and for once
for once you are happy
Julio Alexi Genao
#89. What if your only memory is of who you aren't, not who you are?
Roni O'Connell
#90. My biggest fear is losing memory because memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive is tied up in memory.
Nick Cave
#91. Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.
Storm Jameson
#92. Personality in man is what is "not his own" ... what come from outside, what he has learned, or reflects, all traces of exterior impressions left in the memory.
G.I. Gurdjieff
#93. People who hear the call to conscience follow what they know inwardly
what they know in consciousness or at higher levels of awareness. I call this irresistible knowing. It is a form of divinely transcendent memory
Carlton D. Pearson
#94. I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.
Joshua Foer
#95. We are all dangling in mid-process between what already happened (which is just a memory) and what might happen (which is just an idea). Now is the only time anything happens. When we are awake in our lives, we know what's happening. When we're asleep, we don't see what's right in front of us.
Sylvia Boorstein
#96. Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?
Haruki Murakami
#97. That is what is normal, it's an every day millisecond by millisecond miracle."
Zhi Wawa in Charlie Versus The Quantum Memory.
Steve Merrick
#98. Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me.
Ignatius Of Loyola
#99. My earliest acting memory is making up a play for my mom and dad called The Lonesome Baby. I have no idea what The Lonesome Baby was about. I just remember the title. But I'm sure it was an epic.
Jane Horrocks
#100. I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?
Isabel Allende
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