2,914 Quotes About Memory

The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.

Nostalgia is an illness, but it belongs to the person through whom time is filtered, unpredictably and individually, with all the flaws and defects inherent in human beings. The era that had passed is located in pockets of consciousness, some hidden and unseen, like ponds in remote forests, some bright and familiar like houses on the forest edge, but all of them fragile and changeable, and they die when consciousness dies.

Sometimes memory is the only gift we give ourselves and the only hope we have of finding our way home.

One of our biggest problems is that we mistake our imagination for our memory.

We use the tools of memory and imagination to construct and depict stories; they make up the double-sided face of the same mental coin. Memory houses many images. The ability mentally to depict and store images depends upon the power of association prompted by the rational and imaginative thoughts of the mind. Recollection of past thoughts is dependent upon the quality of our memory system. The Ancient Greeks taught us, memory is the mother of our personal muse.

Both memory and imagination arrest time. By conjoining memory and imagination in forming storytelling’s language, style, and texture, writers’ negate the mind’s march into forgetfulness. We employ the full sprung use of memory and imagination to blunt our descent into nothingness.

I can remember we were happy, I say. Happy to have our own house.‘Can you recall anything specific, like a detail, or is it more a feeling you remember?’Anybody can remember details if you ask them to, I say, but it doesn’t mean it actually happened that way.I wait for him to make eye contact, which he does.‘You have a point, Junior,’ he says.’ You’re right.

Life, he supposes, is like that – not simply a catalogue of events, but an internal narrative that imposes shape and order on those events, and adds and subtracts, and lends meaning where there is none. And if one makes no attempt to separate invention from reality, or to impose some discipline on that inner storyteller, one might wonder whether one has in fact lived dozens of lives, countless lives. Reality, he thinks, is not the same as the truth.

One can speak best through stories. Things only come alive in this way. This is because such things are the children of our experiences. They are conceived during big events in our lives, born when we begin to reflect on those incidents and then grow with us as our appreciation for the memories that brought them into being also lives and thrives.