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Memory Quotes

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Memory Quotes

“I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final. But I was always word-smitten.”

WritingWordsMemory
Author:Charles Frazier
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“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten but that we are all doomed to being forgotten; that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts nothing matters. Everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”

LifeWritingBooksMemorySavingRecognitionConnectionForgettingObscurityRemembering
Author:Susan Orlean
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“The feeling filters in for an instant, then rushes out, leaving lasting watermarks of nostalgia. Neurotransmitters will only impart tired old platitudes of common structure: trite anecdotes with predictable elements. No doubt the perception of this Moment will recede back in with the waves and leave me once again looking to symbols for recollection. But then, perhaps it is wrong of me to think of it this way. It is, yes.”

MemoryIntuitionSymbolismPerception Of RealityNeurotransmittersFeeling And Thought
Book:trenches parallax leapfrog
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“You’re with a girl. She’s brown-haired and side-swept. I imagine that she’s the kind of girl who can easily shop for jean shorts, and speaks kindly more often than not. She seems like the kind of girl who hates New York City because it wreaks havoc on her shoes (really she just thinks it’s a big and scary place), but once had the time of her life in Spain on a backpacking trip when she was 23. Her gaze is focused on the embracing couple as near strangers capable of judgement. She stands bolted next to you like you’re her anchor in the social storm. You two seem finely matched… but what do I know? (Nothing at all.) I accidentally saw a picture of you and it reminded me that I was dating a man rightfully shaking his fist at God, while trying to hold my hand with the other. I was reminded of how fiercely we tried to hold our relationship together, and how devastated and relieved we were in its destruction. There’s water under that bridge. I accidentally saw a picture of you. No big deal. I wrote about it.”

InspirationalMemoryBreak UpsMoving On Letting Go
Author:Joy Wilson
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“I keep having dreams about a lad I met back when I was seventeen,” Bliss was saying. “Perfectly innocent afternoon in its way. One of those endless summers. You never remember it raining in your past, do you? Just summers. We collected blackberries. Then we sat on the beach and talked. He took his shirt off. I kept mine on. I was too ashamed of my body to do the same. He was beautiful. So piss-elegant in his way. All cheek-bones and wrists. Tanned hairless skin. I wanted to be the centre of his world forever.” Bliss smiled, his eyes somewhere in the distance, away from the heat of all these people and their mindless chatter. “It was just a kiss. That was all it was. A sweet, sweet kiss… I never saw him again, even though I went back to that place every afternoon for a week.” His eyes refocused and he glanced at Malcolm, at Oliver. His face was hard, his voice brittle. “I found out he’d been hit by a postal van not two hours after we’d kissed. Died later that night in hospital. I overheard my mother talking about it. She said his name and I had to run away to the beach. I wept for hours. All gone, gone, gone.”

MemorySummers
Book:PoppyHarp
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“Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH: A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay'd By your/their indiff'rence in the dank brown shade Below the garden... His mind's eye sees them quoted on the bottom third of a right-hand page in a (possibly) olive-bound book he read at least five years ago. When he does find them, it will be a great nuisance if no clue is given to their authorship.”

WritingReadingMemory
Book:The Unstrung Harp
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“As I conceptualized the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I knew it had to fulfill Mamie Mobley's charge: to be a place that carried the burden of history and the weight of memory, regardless of how painful or difficult it was. At the core of the museum, therefore, would be a commitment to remember.”

HistoryMemoryPainful MemoriesSmithsonian
Book:A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump
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“It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).”

HistoryMemoryThe PastCensureContextHistoriansPropagandistsMoralists
Book:Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence
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“The spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer.”

SciencePowerComputerPraiseMathematicsMemoryInsightMathSpeedClarityMathematicianSpectacularVon NeumannJohn Von NeumannNeumannJohnny Von NeumannLogarithm
Author:Paul R. Halmos
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“One year later the society claimed victory in another case which again did not fit within the parameters of the syndrome, nor did the court find on the issue. Fiona Reay, a 33 year old care assistant, accused her father of systematic sexual abuse during her childhood. The facts of her childhood were not in dispute: she had run away from home on a number of occasions and there was evidence that she had never been enrolled in secondary school. Her father said it was because she was ‘young and stupid’. He had physically assaulted Fiona on a number of occasions, one of which occurred when she was sixteen. The police had been called to the house by her boyfriend; after he had dropped her home, he heard her screaming as her father beat her with a dog chain. As before there was no evidence of repression of memory in this case. Fiona Reay had been telling the same story to different health professionals for years. Her medical records document her consistent reference to family problems from the age of 14. She finally made a clear statement in 1982 when she asked a gynaecologist if her need for a hysterectomy could be related to the fact that she had been sexually abused by her father. Five years later she was admitted to psychiatric hospital stating that one of the precipitant factors causing her breakdown had been an unexpected visit from her father. She found him stroking her daughter. There had been no therapy, no regression and no hypnosis prior to the allegations being made public. The jury took 27 minutes to find Fiona Reay’s father not guilty of rape and indecent assault. As before, the court did not hear evidence from expert witnesses stating that Fiona was suffering from false memory syndrome. The only suggestion of this was by the defence counsel, Toby Hed­worth. In his closing remarks he referred to the ‘worrying phenomenon of people coming to believe in phantom memories’. The next case which was claimed as a triumph for false memory was heard in March 1995. A father was aquitted of raping his daughter. The claims of the BFMS followed the familiar pattern of not fitting within the parameters of false memory at all. The daughter made the allegations to staff members whom she had befriended during her stay in psychiatric hospital. As before there was no evidence of memory repression or recovery during therapy and again the case failed due to lack of corrobo­rating evidence. Yet the society picked up on the defence solicitor’s statements that the daughter was a prone to ‘fantasise’ about sexual matters and had been sexually promiscuous with other patients in the hospital. ~ Trouble and Strife, Issues 37-43”

LawFantasyPoliceMemorySexual AbuseRapeIncestRape CultureAbusersChildhood AbusePhysical AbuseChild RapePedophileFalse MemoryFalse Memory Syndrome FoundationPaedophileBritish False Memory
Author:Trouble and Strife
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“There's a certain freshness and innocence in people who have always lived in one place and can count on witnesses to their passage through the world. In contrast, those of us who have moved on many times develop tough skin out of necessity. Since we lack roots or corroboration of who we are, we must put our trust in memory to give continuity to our lives...but memory is always cloudy, we can't trust it.”

MemorySelf ImageNomadicEmigrationItinerant
Book:My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile
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“On the train I saw that world passing my window. It was when I came to see it was I who was passing that my self-centered childhood was over. But it was not until I began to write, that I found the world out there revealing, because memory had become attached to seeing, love had added itself to discovery, and because I recognized in my own continuing longing to keep going, the need I carried inside myself to know - the apprehension, first, and then the passion, to connect myself to it. Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it. This is, of course, simply saying that the outside world is the vital component of my inner life. My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my living world. But I was to learn slowly that both these worlds, outer and inner, were different from what they seemed to me in the beginning.”

WorldLovePassionTravelDiscoveryLongingTrainMemoryPassingWriteRevealingIntrospectiveInner WorldConnectVitalOuter WorldTo Know
Book:On Writing
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