2,914 Quotes About Memory

Des années après que mon frère avait déserté ma chambre, après avoir mis en terre tous ceux qui m'étaient chers, j'offrai enfin à Simon la sépulture à laquelle il n'avait jamais eu droit. Il allait y dormir, en compagnie des enfants qui avaient connu son destin, sur cette page portant sa photo, ses dates si rapprochées et son nom, dont l'orthographe différait si peu du mien. Ce livre serait sa tombe.

In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays.

Our minds must be capable of concentrating and living in the present moment, rather than always seeking for the past events that cannot be proven to be true.

Even in forgetting there is an aspect of recollection, a faded few moments of wispy consciousness clung like webs in high-vaulted chambers, moving ever so lightly with the draft.

One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.

I have more than once tried to analyse this apparently deliberate form of self-torture that seems common to so many people in face of the extinction of a valued life, human or animal, and it springs, I think, from a negation of death, as if by summoning and arranging these subjective images one were in some way cheating the objective fact. It is, I believe, an entirely instinctive process, and the distress it brings with it is an incidental, a by-product, rather than a masochistic end.

I saw [Linus Pauling] as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century’s greatest chemist. No doubt about it.

Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.

It’s not magic. I remember because I make comparisons. Not in terms of better or worse, just different. And not all of these memories are great, but they’re mine.Which lends way to believe, that none of our lives are put together on an assembly line. We’re not pre-packaged with memories or programmed with stories. We have to make our own.