M Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with M. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.”
“Memory and the imagination are almost identical. It's the same place in the brain and the same thing is happening. When you think about your own life, there are no memories without place. You are always situated somewhere. I think the imagination - the narrative imagination at least - situates you in a specific space when you start to think of a story. I often use places I know. I put my characters inside rooms and houses that I'm familiar with - sometimes the houses of my parents or grandparents or previous apartments I've lived in.”
“Memory as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority.”
“Memory at last has what I sought.”
“Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]”
“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”
Source: Light in August
“Memory belongs to the imagination.”
“Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.”
“Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.”
Source: We Were the Mulvaneys
“Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all.”
Source: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
“Memory calls us back, Mystery draws us forward.”
“Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)”
“Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.”
Source: Gilead: A Novel
“Memory cannot exist without endurance of the things perceived, and the thing perceived cannot remain where it has never been.”
Source: The works of William Harvey, M.D.
“Memory changes as a person matures.”
“Memory, come tell a fairy tale
About my girl who's lost and gone.
Tell, tell about the golden grail
And bid the swallow, bring her back to me.
Fly close to her and ask her soft and low
If she thinks of me sometimes with love,
If she is well? Ask too before you go
If I am still her dearest, precious dove.
And hurry back, don't lose your way,
So I can think of other things.
But you were too lovely, perhaps, to stay.
I loved you once. Good-bye, my love.”
Source: I Never Saw Another Butterfly: A Play
“Memory creates a hallucination of the past, desire creates a hallucination of the future.”
“Memory cuts both ways; it can either provide you with tremendous strength and a foundation to carry you through your life, or it can be a demon that just ruins your present and your future because you can’t let go of the past.”
“Memory demands an image.”
“Memory depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want of memory, when the defect is in the judgment; and others, by grasping at all, retain nothing.”
“Memory dilutes, but the object remains unaltered.”
Source: Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory
“Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.”
“Memory doesn’t cause pain, conversion of memory into emotion does.”
Source: Smiling Brahma
“Memory doesn't erase. The recall ability fails.”
“Memory,” Dr. McKee says, watching his computer screen, “is really just a series of electrical pulses generated by neurons. If we put an electrode there and monitor it, we’re able to map out the memory. Tracking the electrical signals in your brain creates a pattern, and each pattern represents a specific experience. Look around this room, Tatum,” he says.”
Source: The Adjustment
“Memory embellishes Life. Forgetfulness makes it possible.”
“Memory erases into music”
Source: Night Sky with Exit Wounds
“Memory exercised in a particular way is a natural gift of poetic genius. The poet above all else, is a person who never forgets certain sense impressions which he has experienced and which he can relive again as though with all their original freshness.”
“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
“Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.”
“Memory feeds imagination.”
Source: The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life
“Memory. Genes. That’s how life spoke to the future. The story that never ends – it’s the art of survival.”
Source: They Whisper in my Blood
“Memory had a habit of erasing, leaving only the most necessary.”
Source: Everything Under
“Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.”
Source: Zoli: A Novel
“Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.”
“Memory has always been social. Now we're using search engines and computers to augment our memories, too.”
“Memory has ambushed her again, slamming down a wall between her and the present moment. Sometimes it comes in order, like a story, sometimes in flashes, like a series of snapshots. Sometimes it comes in a split second, cutting through the middle of another thought. It grabs her and won't let her pay attention to what is being said around her. Other times it just settles softly down on her like a pillow, cutting off air.”
“Memory has been discussed here as though it consisted mainly of a body of data. But experts possess skills as well as knowledge. They acquire not only the ability to recognize situations or to provide information about them; they also acquire powerful special skills for dealing with situations as they encounter them. Physicians prescribe and operate as well as diagnose.
The boundary between knowledge and skill is subtle. For example, when we write a computer program in any language except machine language, we are really not writing down processes but data structures. These data structures are then interpreted or compiled into processes that is, into machine-language instructions that the computer can understand and execute. Nevertheless for most purposes it is convenient for us simply to ignore the translation step and to treat the computer programs in higher-level languages as representing processes.”
Source: The Sciences of the Artificial
“Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.”
Source: Midnight's Children
“Memory has many conveniences, and, among others, that of foreseeing things as they have afterwards happened.”
Source: Francesca Carrara
“Memory has no power but what the soul chooses to make of it.”
“Memory has the singular characteristic of recalling in a friend absent, as in a journey long past, only that which is agreeable.”
Source: My Summer in a Garden
“Memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand--evil have I done, and with sorrow have I made acquaintance from age to age, and from age to age evil shall I do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes.”
Source: All Adventure: She Who Must Be Obeyed
“Memory heaps dead leaves on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend the sense.”
Source: Delphi Works of John Galsworthy (Illustrated)
“Memory, imagination, and passionately responding in accord with the deeply embedded impulse to act with decency are pliable mechanisms that we can employ to attain happiness.”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“Memory implies that there is some static time and place you can go back to, whereas if you relive it by trying to put yourself back in that context, its more nuanced, less black and white. More traumatic, but also more exciting. When I knew I had to write about things that would be painful, I put off doing it for ages. But then eventually the fear of not doing it becomes greater than the fear of doing it.”
“Memory in America suffers amnesia.”
Source: Crusaders: the radical legacy of Marian and Arthur Le Sueur
“Memory in Greek mythology is the mother of the muses, and it is so for me. Both personal and societal memory move me strongly, and that is one of the sources of my writing.”
“Memory in the mind of man can adapt to the worst conditions.
I'll give you an example, an analogy of sorts: Each night I sop rags with beer and lay them out in careful strips. With rags soaked in beer I tease cockroaches from a crack in the baseboard. By morning they're good and drunk and I pop them into a baggy, then take them outside and throw the little buggers away.”
Source: Nothing But Trouble
“Memory in youth is active and easily impressible; in old age it is comparatively callous to new impressions, but still retains vividly those of earlier years.”