Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

Aristotle was convinced that a trained memory helped the development of logical thought processes.

We forget more than we remember, we lose more than we find.

Time thins the cloth of memory. As the ages pass, its rich colors fade. Strong wool is beaten by the elements until the pattern of its lesson disintegrates, leaving holes in the truth it was...

In the darkness of night,Demons strut, taunting, goading.In the light of day,Angels sing glorious songs.In the time in between,We live our lives alone and searching.And sometimes, softly,You understand damnation.All is forgotten, all is lost,All but...

We look at the world once, in childhood.The rest is memory.

You may forget the one with whom you have laughed, but never the one with whom you have wept.

But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shews...

As Mary Grannon, the beloved Mary of The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Just Mary’ hour says:So many parents are clinging to some favorite story in their own youth and measuring all children’s material by it—forgetting what...

Its really hard to recall the day you became friends with special people.

Memory is like a curse. We fall into eternity, and memory is a weight that keeps pulling us to where we can never go back to.

Remembering the past always comes with an image or a view attached.

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,...

I came back for you

human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions

An act of kindness may take only a moment of our time, but when captured in the heart the memory lives forever.

Nature has certain mechanism to record all memories of every life being.

Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion.

We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us … we...

Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make...

…the very old men […] believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing...

The thing with giving up is you never know. You never know whether you could have done the job. And I’m sick of not knowing about my life.

Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to...

In response to threat and injury, animals, including humans, execute biologically based, non-conscious action patterns that prepare them to meet the threat and defend themselves. The very structure of trauma, including activation, dissociation and freezing...

Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living. that’s the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred...

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells...

Rising up, rising down! History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky’s eyeglasses; Gandhi’s native-spun cloth, Cortes’ pieces of solid gold (extorted from their original owner, Montezuma); a little...

Sometimes Midas suspected that life was a film with subliminal messages. Things would move along with an acceptable degree of predictability, then be punctuated by some horrible childhood memory.

The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against, every morning until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not...

The arrow of time obscures memory of both past and future circumstance with innumerable fallacies, the least trivial of which is perception.

Sometimes things just slip past you, into your hands and out through your fingers. In my half-in/half-out state I began to wonder if that could happen to people, too.

I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean….I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the...

Inconstancy of every second punishes me.The wind, the rain, the clouds, the days,I try to grasp the hours but they banish me,And I remain in the vortex of incongruity.The lone coyote shrieks,Startling my soul into...

Perhaps memory is a thing that everyone involved has to work at, like stitching up a big quilt out of everything that ever happened to you.

We are the things we don’t remember,the blank spaces, the forgotten words.

No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The “I” is chained to ancestry by many factors… This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.

So if existence was just binary, dead or alive, here or not here, what would be the fucking point in anything? My mom used to say that’s why we have memory. And the opposite of...

Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present. In order to reach any kind of success in automobile racing, a driver must never remember.

That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for...

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things...

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!

The vivid memory of the woods had blossomed into a visceral longing for the Ridge, so immediate that I felt the ghost of my vanished house rise around me, a cold mountain wind thrumming past...

The halcyon days of childhood, a time when everything lay open before him, when the most minor episodes could be construed as events and every chance encounter … gave rise to fresh insights.

Most have been forgotten. Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best. The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both.

He’s not learning. He’s not experiencing. He’s remembering.He walks to the next screen, hungry to be himself again.

I have more than once tried to analyse this apparently deliberate form of self-torture that seems common to so many people in face of the extinction of a valued life, human or animal, and it...

The instant is not in time — time is in the instant.

What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that’s what he was...

The memory slowly faded away. I could feel tears strolling down my snout from my eyes. I missed my father… He did what he could to save me that day.

certain details, somewhat curtailed, live in my memory. But I don’t see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what...