2,914 Quotes About Memory

I am of a temperament that needs the written word. For anything to have meaning, it has to be set down, it must live on paper before it is fully alive in my head. It has to be a series of words in a sequence in order to reveal a meaning and pattern.

Dreams are memories we’ve lost to sleep.

So much you could forget — the sequence of your own life. Maybe humans weren't meant to live this long, maybe brains couldn't retain this much life, maybe the natural way of things was to die at thirty, when you could still remember it all, or most of it.

The events in moment of today is a memory for tomorrow.

Perhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything.

And I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.

Growth requires that you gain mastery over the tyranny of your own memory.

But then comes a time when forgetting isn't possible. And I do mean a particular time when no amount of dreaming, not then and maybe not ever, can change how naked and unimportant we become in our own eyes.

No one ever forgets a talk they had that lasted through the night.