2,914 Quotes About Memory

The liar has a bad memory.

Consciousness returns to its own dark thoughts and bad memories as reliably as kids to their own scabs, and maybe it's not so difficult to understand why. The mind doesn't like unresolved issues. Except that moods don't get resolved, they get forgotten – but just try forgetting the free-fall through depression's vacuum in a hurry. Worse than that, depression isn't just a memory, it's a state of mind. If you remember it, you're in it.

In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

And though, indeed, it only happened once, it’s gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s a memory for them to happen in …

Jehanne said that it would always be like this. That I would always be young and beautiful in her memory, and she in mine. That I would never grow resentful, never be tempted to betray her. That she would never grow restless and fickle, and see to replace me. So you see, not exactly the sentiments of a great and terrible love affair.

She knew that she had a tendency to allow her mind to wander, but surely that's what made the world interesting. One thought led to another, one memory triggered another. How dull it would be, she thought, not to be reminded of the interconnectedness of everything, how dull for the present not to evoke the past, for here not to imply there.

He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.

The ants Geiser recently observed under a dripping fir tree are not concerned with what anyone might know about them; nor were the dinosaurs, which died out before a human being set eyes on them. All the papers, whether on the wall or on the carpet, can go. Who cares about the Holocene? Nature needs no names. Geiser knows that. The rocks do not need his memory.

So it enables the voice of Robert Stack or someone else like him to do for us what it needs to, which is remind us that every moment of our lives is plugged in. Every moment is crucial. And if we recognize this and embrace it, we will one day be able to look back and understand and feel and regret and reminisce and, if we are lucky, cherish.