2,914 Quotes About Memory

I carry the memory somewhere inside my body I can't control, can't even access to reach inside and edit the memory out. I still want to edit it out. I still want to be free of it. But I know I'm bound in ways I'll never see, never understand. We carry what makes us.

You carry your past with you and along the way it repeats.

Later, I imagined that the past is not behind us at all, but unseen beneath our feet. We are supported by it as we walk, sometimes balanced, sometimes not, and if we tried we could reach below to grasp the person we once were. It might even be possible to pull them up to join us. Now I wonder if our past is always nearby, and our future too, and if we look carefully we can see both. But who wants to look carefully?

...Troy itself was disappointingly small. Like little more than your ordinary city block and a few stories in height, practically.Although now that I remember, everything in William Shakespeare's house at Stratford-on-Avon was astonishingly tiny, too. As if only imaginary people had lived there then.Or perhaps it is only the past itself, which is always smaller than one had believed.

Never confuse who you are with what you've done.

Mais nous croyons que l'esprit reconstruit ses souvenirs sous la pression de la société. . . que celle-ci le détermine à transfigurer ainsi le passé . . // But we believe that the mind reconstructs its memories under the pressure of society. . . that this causes the mind to transfigure the past . . .

Past events leave traces in the memory like an ax chopping wood. Chips fly; they remain where they fall even after the wood has been used to light the stove.

[M]y terror of forgetting is greater than my terror of having too much to remember. Let the accumulated facts about the past continue to multiply. ... So that those who need can find that this person did live, those events really took place, this interpretation is not the only one.

For cause of disturbance to bottom half of body, see page 143.