I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

… [O]ne of the most influential approaches to thinking about memory in recent years, known as connectionism, has abandoned the idea that a memory is an activated picture of a past event. Connectionist or neural...

I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

Do all people have that? A face, a phrase, a landscape, an air bubble from the past suddenly floating up as if released by the head warden’s child from a cell in the brain while...

That brief walk was one of those moments he knew he’d remember and look back on, one of those moments that he’d try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but...

The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest— Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood, whether busy or at...

The Holy Spirit does not speak to a soul that is distracted and garrulous. He speaks by His quiet inspirations to a soul that is recollected, to a soul that knows how to keep silence.

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

It’s strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

Can we account for instinct?’ said Monte Cristo. ‘Are there not some places where we seem to breathe sadness? — why, we cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections — an idea which carries...

Photography is never real, it’s merely one of many ways of telling the truth.

Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.

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

You should always be taking pictures, if not with a camera then with your mind. Memories you capture on purpose are always more vivid than the ones you pick up by accident.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

Thus, the “memories” that people reported contained little information about the event they were trying to recall (the speaker’s tone of voice) but were greatly influenced by the properties of the retrieval cue that we...