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Memory Quotes

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Memory Quotes

“Het ligt niet in de menselijke aard alleen op herinneringen te teren, en zoals planten en welk schepsel dan ook voedsel uit de aarde en steeds nieuw gefilterd licht uit de hemel nodig hebben, zodat hun kleuren niet verbleken en de bloemkelken niet verwelkt hun bladeren verliezen, zo hebben ook dromen, ook dromen die schijnbaar niet van deze aarde zijn, voedsel nodig van het zinnelijke, ondersteund door tederheid en beelden, anders stolt hun bloed en de intensiteit van hun licht verbleekt.”

LoveMemoryGermanStefan ZweigDutch Translation
Book:Journey into the Past
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“Time, I think, is like walking backward away from something: say, from a kiss. First there is the kiss; then you step back, and the eyes fill up your vision, then the eyes are framed in the face as you step further away; the face then is part of a body, and then the body is framed in a doorway, then the doorway framed in the trees beside it. The path grows longer and the door smaller, the trees fill up your sight and the door is lost, then the path is lost in the woods and the woods lost in the hills. Yet somewhere in the center still is the kiss. That's what time is like.”

TimeDistanceMemoryKissDescriptionBackwardsWalking Away
Book:Engine Summer
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“There is a story that Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly, and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honor of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poets by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness told him he would pay him half the fee agreed on for the poem, and if he liked he might apply for the balance to his sons of Tyndaraus, as they had gone halves in the panegyric. The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody; but in the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement. He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves, and we shall employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it.”

MemorySimonidesCiceroDe OratoreLoci
Author:Marcus Tullius Cicero
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“One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. "This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older," Eagleman said--why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.”

TimeBrainPerceptionAgingMemoryNear DeathDetailAmygdalaLife ThreateningDavid Eagleman
Author:Burkhard Bilger
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“Cultele memoriei de orice natură, indiferent dacă se prezintă ȋn veșminte religioase, civilizatoare sau politice, trebuie privite... cu neȋncredere și asta fără excepție: sub pretextul unei comemorări purificatoare, eliberatoare sau fie și numai fondatoare de identitate, ele dau inevitabil apă la moară unei tendințe ascunse de repetare și repunere ȋn scenă. ... măsurile de stingere sau de domolire a flăcării mocnite cu care ard amintirile suferințelor trebuie să facă parte din regulile de ȋnțelepciune ale oricărei civilizații,”

MemoryCivilizationsMemorieCivilizatii
Book:Zorn und Zeit
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“If there is anything certain in life, it is this. Time doesn't always heal. Not really. I know they say it does, but that is not true. What time does is to trick you into believing that you have healed, that the hurt of a great loss has lessened. But a single word, a note of a song, a fragrance, a knife point of dawn light across an empty room, any one of these things will take you back to that one moment you have never truly forgotten. These small things are the agents of memory. They are the sharp needle points piercing the living fabric of your life. Life, my children, isn't linear where the heart is concerned. It is filled with invisible threads that reach out from your past and into your future. These threads connect every second we have lived and breathed. As your own lives move forward and as the decades pass, the more of these threads are cast. Your task is to weave them into a tapestry, one that tells the story of the time we shared.”

LifeHeartPainPastTimeSongHurtLossHealingSadnessSorrowFutureMemoryWoundsStoryFragrance
Author:Stephen Lee
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“You can't be serious. Your temple was destroyed two thousand years ago and you're grieving today?” Yes, as if it had happened only yesterday. “A lot of people have told me the Jews were crazy,” she said. “They were right.” Yes, we're crazy. “It's human nature to forget what hurts you, isn't it? Wasn't forgetfulness a gift of the gods to the ancient world? Without it, life would be intolerable, wouldn't it?” Yes, but the Jews live by other rules. For a Jew, nothing is more important than memory. He is bound to his origins by memory. It is memory that connects him to Abraham, Moses and Rabbi Akiba. If he denies memory he will have denied his own honor. “So you insist on keeping all your wounds open?” Those wounds exist; it is therefore forbidden and unhealthy to pretend that they don't.”

MemoryTraumaWoundsForgetfulnessJewishJewish TraditionJewish IdentityJewish Humor
Book:The Forgotten
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“«Questo è quel che sognavo» pensai. «Così speravo che fosse, la vita a Manderley.» Avrei voluto restare lì seduta, senza parlare, senza dover ascoltare gli altri, riponendo nel cassetto dell'eternità questo momento in cui tutti eravamo in pace, soddisfatti e un po' assopiti, perfino l'ape che ci volava attorno. Tra poco non sarebbe più stato lo stesso, sarebbero arrivati un altro giorno, un altro anno. E noi forse saremmo cambiati, non ci saremmo mai più seduti così. Qualcuno di noi sarebbe partito, o si sarebbe ammalto, o sarebbe morto: il futuro si estendeva davanti a noi, sconosciuto, imprevedibile, forse non sarebbe stato quel che volevamo, quel che avevamo disposto. Ma il momento presente era salvo, era intoccabile. Maxim e io eravamo seduti qui, mano nella mano, il passato e il futuro non avevano alcuna importanza. La sicurezza stava in questo insignificante frammento di tempo, che lui non avrebbe mai ricordato. ... Per loro era solo un dopo pranzo, le tre e un quarto di un pomeriggio qualsiasi, un'ora e un giorno come tutti gli altri. Loro - a differenza di me - non avevano il desiderio di trattenere questo momento, di salvarlo. Non avevano paura, loro.”

TimeFearMemoryHappy Times
Book:Rebecca
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“This evening, which I have tried to spirit away, is a strange burden to me. While time moves on, while the day will soon end and I already wish it gone, there are men who have entrusted all their hopes to it, all their love and their last efforts. There are dying men or others who are waiting for a debt to come due, who wish that tomorrow would never come. There are others for whom the day will break like a pang of remorse; and others who are tired, for whom the night will never be long enough to give them the rest that they need. And I - who have lost my day - what right do I have to wish that tomorrow comes?”

TimeExistenceMemoryExistentialismTemporality
Book:Le Grand Meaulnes
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“All things pass away. Love may live for a month or a year, but sooner or later, it leaves.” I stopped working with the mortar. “No,” I told her, because my heart knew better. “That is not true.” “Have you lived so long as I?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I told her. “But I have lived long enough to know that love doesn’t die.” I might not remember my wife’s face or her name, but I remembered her smell, the touch of her hand, and the sound of her laughter. Not even the witch’s magic could steal that from me. I loved my wife still, and the pain of her loss burned in my heart. “Not if you cherish it. Love, like any living thing, needs to be fed. Only if you starve it will it die.”

LoveTimeMemoryRemembrance
Book:Shifting Shadows
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“Our days are open and transparent, but enveloped too by the faintest membrane of time, almost imperceptible when our gaze passes through it to consider a single day on its own. But come another day, and another after that, the membrane will thicken, that which before was as clear as day will then be blurred and faintly obscured; come yet more and only the outlines will be perceptible, until they too recede and dissolve, and what happened inside them will then be hidden from us, sealed away by time.”

TimeMemoryForgetting The PastHuman Fallibility Error War
Book:The School of Night
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“Memory is a patient sculptor. It chisels away the rough edges and refines the scenes you carry. A childhood street that once felt endless becomes shorter in recollection, but more idyllic. ... The mind softens the harshness and highlights the tenderness. It leaves you with impressions more than exact details: the smell of jasmine in the evening, the sound of rain on an old roof, the feeling of safety in a friend’s kitchen.”

SelfPastTimeEmotionPsychologyPerceptionReflectionMemoryNostalgiaTenderness
Author:Ajmal, from the book "Borders of the Inner World"
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“Today - not even that, for already it was tomorrow - would slide away like all the other days. Not a red letter day. Not the day of my desperate bidding. Not the day on which the love of my life was snaffled away from me. I opened the front door and looked out into the night. It was cold and uncomforting. I liked it like that. I hated the moment, yet I loved it because in it I still loved Lucy.”

LoveTimeRelationshipsMemoryTime Passing
Book:The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories
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“As I went back to the party the sadness of all the forgetting stung me. Even already, I thought, time is at work; time is ticking her away; time is destroying her, killing all there was between us. And with time on my side I would look back on the day without bitterness and without emotion. I would remember it only as a flash on the brittle surface of nothing, as a day that was rather funny, as the day we got drunk on cake.”

LoveTimeRelationshipsMemoryTime PassingPassage Of Time
Book:The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories
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