Quotes about Memory

How do we remember to remember?  That's a question I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends.  Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon.  You have to establish the horizon.  You have to mark the white.  A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic.  Or so I've come to believe. ~~as stated by Edgar in 'Duma Key'

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

“... But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me everywhere I went.  She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station.  It’s there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it.  But why should you?”

A pleasure is only full grown when it is remembered.

I’d almost forgotten how to smoke. Doreen gave me a light with the console lighter and I nearly choked drawing the creamy smoke into my pink little lungs. The taste was bitter yet rich. Smoking was just like riding a bike---I quickly got the hang of it again. It felt good to kill off a few useless cells.

The Zen masters have the right idea--no pain no gain:  thwack a silly nebbish and he'll remember it far longer and more indelibly than any words you muster at him.  Not absolutely everything can or should have to be explained, and particularly not to everybody.  But a concussion is a value-judgment anyone gets the point of.

Live out of your imagination instead of out of your memory.

We shook hands. Norm’s hand felt like salted mackerel. Our brief interaction had put him in a talkative mood. “There’s no business like shoe business,” he uttered with a death rattle laugh, heh heh, peering at me sideways like a depraved cherub as he droned on and on about the good old days in the shoe business, the bonus money and the belles whose stockinged ankles he fondled when he could still get a boner … but my mind was elsewhere. I couldn’t stop thinking about Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman. Who was this character?

Is there a new experience in meditation? The desire for experience, the higher experience which is beyond and above the daily or the commonplace, is what keeps the well-spring empty. The craving for more experience, for visions, for higher perception, for some realization or other, makes the mind look outward, which is no different from its dependence on environment and people. The curious part of meditation is that an event is not made into an experience. It is there, like a new star in the heavens, without memory taking it over and holding it, without the habitual process of recognition and response in terms of like and dislike. Our search is always outgoing; the mind seeking any experience is outgoing. Inward-going is not a search at all; it is perceiving. Response is always repetitive, for it comes always from the same bank of memory.

To some extent, I have only lived to have something to outlive. By confiding these futile remembrances to paper, I am conscious of accomplishing the most important act of my life. I was predestined to Memory.

Nothing is forgotten in the processes of idealization. Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him.

I can only guess that it made the world he went back to…strangely without meaning.  Though he lived in it, though he even enjoyed it, it remained utterly remote.  I think it had lost sense for him.  In his heart was the reflection of a lovely dream that he could never quite recall.

Every photo you take is a self-portrait.

Happy is the man who knows or even the man who remembers those silent vigils where silence itself was the sign of the communion of souls!

There is something marvelously soft in the study of nature which attaches a name to every being, a thought to every name, affection and memories to every thought.

Whoever lives for poetry must read everything. How often has the light of a new idea sprung for me from a simple brochure! When one allows himself to be animated by new images, he discovers iridescence in the images of old books. Poetic ages unite in a living memory. The new age awakens the old. The old age comes to live again in the new. Poetry is never as unified as when it diversifies.

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

A pretext--not a cause--is sufficient for us to enter the "solitary situation", the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy.

Reverie is commonly classified among the phenomena of psychic detente. It is lived out in a relaxed time which has no linking force. Since it functions with inattention, it is often without memory. It is a flight from out of the real that does not always find a consistent unreal world.

Try thinking of your memory as a digital videotape that has been running in your mind since birth.

What you think of as they past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now.  When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace -- and you do so now.   The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind.  When the future comes, it comes as the Now.  When you think about the future, you do it now.  Past and future obviously have no reality of their own.  Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present.  Their reality is "borrowed" from the Now.

Short term memory makes no difference if you've lost your mind.

I spent a lot of time mulling over what S. B. had told me about his thirteen months in solitary confinement, surrounded by death, and the "wild thinking" that drew him back to his beginnings. It seemed to me that this urge to retrace one's steps nto the past arises neither from nostalgia nor from a need to tell one's story to the world. It is a way of cheating death. An instinct for life in the face of oblivion. For to recollect the innocence of childhood o the viogr of youth in a moment of peril is to retrieve a sense of leife's infinite possiblitiy, ot conjure a period in our life when the wold seemed ours for the taking, and we thought we would never die. It is, in essence, to recapture a sense of our capacity to act and initiate someothing new, for, as Hannah Arendt notes, action is synonymous with our capacity to bring new life into the wold. Mortality is thus conuntermandded by natality, ai ti si this unquenchable desire for renewal, this refusal to go gently into that good night, that explains why we go back, tumbling through the darkness, in search of the light that flooded and filled our first conscious years. The days of wine and roses. When our livesstretched before us liek a field of dreams. But if our imagniation springs to our rescue in such dark times, holding out the promise of rebirth, how do we fare when we are released from darkness, and are returned to our everyday lives? How do we address the injustices we have endured, the life we have wasted, the pain we have so needlessly suffered? This question was much on my mind the day I wen to see Fina Kamara in the Murraytown Amputee Camp.

The heart has no memory.

I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound - if I can remember any of the damn things.

Live out of your imagination instead of out of your memory.

He watched through a crack inside just pretending to be dead he wanted to fix each pallbearer in his memory . . . it seems to me a telephone was installed in the coffin to someone yet again Stalin is sending his instructions.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fate may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

Sweet Mercy! to the gates of heaven This minstrel lead, his sins forgiven; The rueful conflict, the heart riven With vain endeavour, And memory of Earth's bitter leaven Effaced forever.