Memory - Quotes
How I wish I could walk through the doors of my mind;
Hold memory close at hand,
Help me understand the years.
How I wish I could choose between Heaven and Hell.
When my hair`s all but gone and my memory fades
And the crowds don`t remember my name
When my hands don`t play the strings the same way
I know you will still love me the same...
Our present swarms with traces of our past. We are histories of ourselves, narratives. I am not this momentary mass of flesh reclined on the sofa typing the letter a on my laptop; I am my thoughts full of the traces of the phrases that I am writing; I am my mother`s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I`ve written, what I`ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word "memory" into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.
The difference between past and future, between cause and effect, between memory and hope, between regret and intention... in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference.
Lies beget other lies. Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality. When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world itself becomes your memory, and if questions arise, you can always point others back to it.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seem to have vanished completely.
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.
The general root of superstition [is] that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.
It is very difficult to be sure of anything, once you begin doubting your memory on principle.
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.
You see, now fear often fingers your heart,
and at times the world seems only distant news;
the old trees guard your childhood for you
as an ever more ancient memory.