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Memory Quotes

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Memory Quotes

“The first and last weakness of his life, before him again. For a moment he felt himself blinded by his own memories; his own remembrances of the wits and wiles of Marian Halcombe that would steal into his thoughts; the sound of her laughter at his outrageous tales, the shadowed glance of distrust, the way her eyebrows would raise ever so slightly despite her resolution to seem disinterested in his foreign insights. She was the first woman he ventured to have complete equality in matching his tremendous cleverness.”

“On that winter afternoon, the two boys hurried outside right after lunch, pulling enormous sleds that seemed almost larger than themselves. As they climbed the hill, they kept dodging sleds rushing past, packed with people of all ages. Most were children and teenagers, but there were also young adults and even respectable grown villagers. Sometimes grandparents came too, ‘to remember the old days.’ They rode together with their children or grandchildren, letting the younger ones steer. And after reaching the bottom – or tumbling halfway down – the ‘veterans’ laughed, shouted, and squealed with joy no less than the children. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book Two Context note: A happy moment of childhood joy and community life in a rural Ukrainian village – a reminder that even under repression, warmth and memory endured.”

“As soon as Peter took off his coat and saw what his grandmother had cooked, he ran straight to the table and climbed into ‘his’ place – a large, sturdy wooden armchair with a small stool set on top of it. He bit eagerly into the pasty, taking large mouthfuls and greedily washing them down with milk. At one moment, the boy moved a little too abruptly, and a thin stream of warm milk escaped from the corner of his mouth, slid between cheek and chin, slipped under his collar, and disappeared on his chest, gently warming his skin. Peter wiped the spilled milk with his sleeve, took another pasty – then another, and another… Years later, this moment – so full of bright childhood sensations – would return to him night after night, haunting the hungry Peter, tormenting both soul and body in his sleep. Repeated endlessly, the dream would turn into suffering – a symbol of doom and unrealized hopes. And even within this seemingly kind dream, a Damoclean sword would hang over his mind: the impossibility, the futility of ever turning it into reality. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book Two Context note: A memory of warmth, abundance, and family love that later becomes a recurring dream for a starving prisoner. The contrast reveals how childhood comfort turns into psychological torment under hunger and repression.”

“Since we were college students when we were together, all of our dates took place in the confines of our tiny town. We never went farther afield. We just did laps around town, as if we were playing an endless game of Monopoly. And yet we were never bored. We’d meet at the library after class and go to a movie; then we’d go to our usual café and talk. After that we’d go back to her place and make love. Every once in a while she’d pack lunch for us and we’d take the tram to the spot with the best view in town and have a picnic. It wasn’t anything too fancy or adventurous, but we were happy. It was all we needed.”

“Your kind’s memories are tricky things,” she said finally. “They are like oil paintings. Even the first draft is an impression, an imperfect recreation of the event itself. Yet each time you access those memories, you paint a new layer overtop the old, adding small changes and tweaks. Those alterations grow and compound on themselves over time until the current painting almost doesn’t resemble the original.”

“The Remnants We carry small membranes of memories Within us As do trees, flowers, stones, All life force around us Fragments of memories Engraved in chips of iron, copper, silver... Interlaced in the workings of men Intertwined into the streets, buildings The networks around us Pathways between ages Each carrying their Remnants of the past”

“What is man that thou art mindful of him? Melancholy. Men, in a smoking room, recounting their conquests to one another. Was it, as always assumed, a mere boastfulness, a mere rooster crow from the dunghill? No… It was the passionate desire to recreate, to live over again those inestimable instants of life, so tragically few, so irrecoverably lost. ‘That reminds me of one time when I was staying——’ Yes, you can see the wretched man trying to summon them back, those few paltry episodes, and make of them, for his solace, a tiny immortal bouquet.”

“A lover of comfort might shrug after looking at the whole apparent jumble of furniture, old paintings, statues with missing arms and legs, engravings that were sometimes bad but precious in memory, and bric-a-brac. Only the eye of a connoisseur would have blazed with eagerness at the sight of this painting or that, some book yellowed with age, a piece of old porcelain, or stones and coins. But the furniture and paintings of different ages, the bric-a-brac that meant nothing to anyone but had been marked for them both by a happy hour or memorable moment, and the ocean of books and sheet music breathed a warm life that oddly stimulated the mind and aesthetic sense. Present everywhere was vigilant thought. The beauty of human effort shone here, just as the eternal beauty of nature shone all around. pp. 492-493”

“An artist adopts a radically different view regarding the importance of time than a businessperson does. Instead of perceiving time as a merchantable facet doled out incrementally according to marketplace demands, an artist portrays time as an agent of destruction. The irrevocability of time frames the human condition. Time might the medium of all human experience, but its passage obscures and eventually obliterates all human endeavors. Time unchecked leads to a blank slate of nothingness. Time’s destructive march towards meaningless is arrested through memory and art depicting humankind’s struggles and accomplishments.”

“This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).”

“Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasise in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. there is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy— or lie—prone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organised abuse seriously.”

“Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.”

“Allegations of multi-perpetrator and multi-victim sexual abuse emerged to public awareness in the early 1980s contemporaneously with the denials of the accused and their supporters. Multi-perpetrator sexual offences are typically more sadistic than solo offences and organised sexual abuse is no exception. Adults and children with histories of organised abuse have described lives marked by torturous and sometimes ritualistic sexual abuse arranged by family members and other care-givers and authority figures. It is widely acknowledged, at least in theory, that sexual abuse can take severe forms, but when disclosures of such abuse occur, they are routinely subject to contestation and challenge. People accused of organised, sadistic or ritualistic abuse have protested that their accusers are liars and fantasists, or else innocents led astray by overly zealous investigators. This was an argument that many journalists and academics have found more convincing than the testimony of alleged victims.”

“I thought if I could touch this place or feel it this brokenness inside me might start healing. Out here its like I'm someone else, I thought that maybe I could find myself if I could just come in I swear I'll leave. Won't take nothing but a memory from the house that built me.”

“I was riddled with memory issues that became so severe at the age of 45 that I had to apply for disability benefits. At the age of 50, my mental functioning was in decline with severe short term memory issues, concentration problems and chronic fatigue. My kidneys were testing bad on blood tests. The USA has refused all applications for occupational disease and disability benefits.”

“Consistent and chronic distractions have the power we give it focal access, to rob us of our long-term historic memory of unhurried moments in life where we are divinely invited to experience that which is the lovely, praiseworthy and excellent...give heed to the call of voices in a song that raises the vibration of a melodic verses, in such a spectacular way, that our neurons create a bio-celluar concert to revive the soul of our best memories. . .selah”

“In this chapter I restrict myself to exploring the nature of the amnesia which is reported between personality states in most people who are diagnosed with DID. Note that this is not an explicit diagnostic criterion, although such amnesia features strongly in the public view of DID, particularly in the form of the fugue-like conditions depicted in films of the condition, such as The Three Faces of Eve (1957). Typically, when one personality state, or ‘alter’, takes over from another, they have no idea what happened just before. They report having lost time, and often will have no idea where they are or how they got there. However, this is not a universal feature of DID. It happens that with certain individuals with DID, one personality state can retrieve what happened when another was in control. In other cases we have what is described as ‘co-consciousness’ where one personality state can apparently monitor what is happening when another personality state is in control and, in certain circumstances, can take over the conversation.”