Quotes about Memory

After his great awakening, the Buddha continued to meditate and to devote himself to others; otherwise his vision would have receded into a pleasant memory.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

A warm breeze blew through my window like a gentle wave lapping the sandy shore in summer at low tide, and as I took in a breath of air that blanketed my body like tall grass in a field I felt for just that moment in time, like I did when I was a child. I felt that I had not one worry, not one burden, nothing was on my mind accept that breeze that made the curtains swell like balloons.

Now they want to crush the poor as they were once crushed. Memory does not always arrive whole from its journeys across the generations.

'The horror of that moment,' the King went on, 'I shall never, never forget!'
'You will, though,' the Queen said, 'if you don't make a memorandum of it.'

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

All genuine learning is active, not passive.  It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory.  It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher.

There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.

 How can infinite consciousness cease to be? The person is nothing but infinite consciousness. Who dies and when, to whom does this infinite consciousness belong and how? Even when millions of bodies die, this consciousness exists undiminished.

Remorse is memory awake.

Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions.  Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego.  Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn.  The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise.  After that day we become seekers.

Oh look at how she listens
She says nothing of what she thinks
She just goes stumbling through her memories
Staring out on to Grey Street

Should at that moment the full moon
Step forth upon the hill,
And memories hard to bear at noon,
By moonlight harder still,
Form in the shadows of the trees,---
Things that you could not spare
And live, or so you thought, yet these
All gone, and you still there,
A man no longer what he was,
Not yet the thing he planned...

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

It's only a dream
Just a memory without anywhere to stay

The palest ink is better than the best memory.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative of truth but not its twin.

The wisest man I ever knew taught me something I never forgot. And although I never forgot it, I never quite memorized it either. So what I'm left with is the memory of having learned something very wise that I can't quite remember.

Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy.  One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith.  But they are both equally true.

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.