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Memories Quotes

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Memories Quotes

“Three thousand people died at ground zero. Their families are entitled to a little bit of respect, to respect the memory of those poor people that died there. And how about the families of all those soldiers that died in the two ensuing wars? Aren't they entitled to a little bit of respect - the kids, the wives, the parents?”

“My first operating system project was to build a real-time system called RSX-11M that ran on Digital's PDP-11 16-bit series of minicomputers. ... a multitasking operating system that would run in 32 KB of memory with a hierarchical file system, application swapping, real-time scheduling, and a set of development utilities. The operating system and utilities were to run on the entire line of PDP-11 platforms, from the very small systems up through the PDP-11/70 which had memory-mapping hardware and supported up to 4 MB of memory.”

“The average person's short-term memory can hold only five to seven bits of data at any one moment. If you put more items in, others fall out. The older you are, the more you have crammed into those memory circuits. Twenty-five-year-olds can remember things because they still have empty space. Some of us take our children to the supermarket in the hope they will remember why we are there.”

“I've been moving a little to the music while I worked ...and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my muscles are, how rigidly I've been holding myself...Mostly I've been moving cautiously, numbly, steeled because I know, at any moment, I may be ambushed by overwhelming grief. You never know when it's coming, the word or gesture or bit of memory that dissolved you entirely...It happens every day at first, then not for a day or two, then there's a week when grief washes in every morning, every afternoon.”

“I'm not known as a singer, but in life I like to do things that are a bit beyond my reach to keep myself from slipping. I find that technology has made it so that we don't need to have a memory system, and as I get older I want to do things that challenge me. What could be more challenging than doing this show with a knee that's been replaced, after tearing my Achilles heel with a baker's cyst on the back of my knee? And then I have to try and dance!”

“Any young boy can nowadays explain human flight - mechanistically: " ... and to climb you shove the throttle all the way forward and pull back just a little on the stick. ... " One might as well explain music by saying that the further over to the right you hit the piano the higher it will sound. The makings of a flight are not in the levers, wheels, and pedals but in the nervous system of the pilot: physical sensations, bits of textbook, deep-rooted instincts, burnt-child memories of trouble aloft, hangar talk.”

“The one thing about kids is that you never really know exactly what they're thinking or how they're seeing. After writing about kids, which is a little bit like putting the experience under a magnifying glass, you realize you have no idea how you thought as a kid. I've come to the conclusion that most of the things that we remember about our childhood are lies. We all have memories that stand out from when we were kids, but they're really just snapshots. You can't remember how you reacted because your whole head is different when you stand aside.”

“One thing I like about writing is that it provides such a wonderful opportunity for confidential chats with readers. In the privacy of writing, and reading, we can discuss topics that are a little touchy, a bit embarrassing, and feel less alone in the process. Feeling consumed by memories from high school. Feeling wimpy. Feeling time-obsessed. Yearning for our fathers. Wishing we were taller, or shorter, or less average. To name just a few.”

“It's funny how insomnia has a way of hauling faded memories up from the cellar of the mind, unearthing buried bits of nostalgia from deep within and spreading the broken, jagged pieces out in front of you like a display of junk at a garage sale. It makes you feel cheap and guilty when you didn't do a thing in the world to kindle the dull burn in your veins or the sting in your eyes. Some nights the painful past unexpectedly pushes up through the floorboards like an ugly nightmarish weed, and by doing so, cultivates and nurtures an entirely new species of headache.”

“It is a bit more challenging for the simple fact that now the stories I am writing are relying more on my imagination than on facts, more on research than on memory; so it is basically a slower writing process, more reading, more exploring. On the other hand, this approach is a little bit relieving too, since many times while writing [How the Soldieer Repairs the Gramophone] I felt too close and equal to my character.”

“There is also a particular area of sleep called slow-wave sleep. I immediately liked this idea. It turns out this part of sleep is where the brain basically gets into step with itself and gets into this one single phase of these relatively slow brain waves - around 10 Hz or so - and the whole brain 'fires all at once'. This is a brilliant bit of sleep where we consolidate memory and learning, and memory is one of my obsessions really.”