c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building.I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final s
— Alice Munro
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
— E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
And anyway, the anticipation was always worse than the thing itself - the anticipation and the memory, of course. And the anticipation of the memory was maybe the worst part of all.
— Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel
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.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There
He moved on down the alley, his feet walking forward and his brain swimming backward through a sea of time. It was a dark sea, much darker than the alley. The tide was slow and there were no waves, just tiny ripples that murmured very softly. Telling him about yesterday. Telling him that yesterday could never really be discarded, it was always a part of now. There was just no way to get rid of it. No way to push it aside or throw it into an ash can, or dig a hole and bury it. For all buried memories were nothing more than slow-motion boomerangs, taking their own sweet time to come back. This one had taken seven years.
— David Goodis, Street of No Return
Ladies and gentlemen, when you paint your lips, eyes, nails, hair, side-beards, or whatever, to look beautiful or handsome, don't forget your up stairs, if you don't go up there to put things in order, then, consider the former attributes null and void.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Each loved one went silently down
— bubbles bursting leaving behindimages they heldto stick on the glass of memory.
Like her father, Bess never forgot a hurt of a service.
— Jeane Westin, His Last Letter: Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester
The older I got the more I appreciated the role of travel as a stimulus to memories, and the way in which journeys even to new places were somehow always awakening memories of places seen in an ever-receding past.
— Michael Jacobs, The Robber of Memories: A River Journey Through Colombia
To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.
— Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
I thought I wanted these memories, but now I realize he hardly knows me.
— Kasie West, Split Second
One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything that makes others happy.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
If I had to choose a moment in time when I knew my life would be different going forward—when I knew I would be different—this would be it.
— T.M. Frazier, The Dark Light of Day
In every evocation of a childhood scene, my stepfather's face is the least detailed, the most out of focus; when I think of him my memory's eyes have cataracts.
— Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
In the specific case of the use of the term “false memory” to describe errors in details in laboratory tasks (e.g., in word-learning tasks), the media and public are set up all too easily to interpret such research as relevant to “false memories” of abuse because the term is used in the public domain to refer to contested memories of abuse. Because the term “false memory” is inextricably tied in the public to a social movement that questions the veracity of memories for childhood sexual abuse, the use of the term in scientific research that evaluates memory errors for details (not whole events) must be evaluated in this light."From:What's in a Name for Memory Errors? Implications and Ethical Issues Arising From the Use of the Term “False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior 14(3) pages 201-233, 2004
— Jennifer J. Freyd
Fantasies... who needs fantasies? I have memories.
— B.J. Neblett
The past is a hotel. You can visit any time
—  enjoy the view. But you can't live there. The cost is to high.
when it comes to youit belongs to youand, when it belongs to you, it is your.Take care of your challenges
— Prakhar Srivastav
Who that has ever visited the borders of this classic sea, has not felt at the first sight of its waters a glow of reverent rapture akin to devotion, and an instinctive sensation of thanksgiving at being permitted to stand before these hallowed waves? All that concerns the Mediterranean is of the deepest interest to civilized man, for the history of its progress is the history of the development of the world; the memory of the great men who have lived and died around its banks; the recollection of the undying works that have come thence to delight us for ever; the story of patient research and brilliant discoveries connected with every physical phenomenon presented by its waves and currents, and with every order of creatures dwelling in and around its waters. The science of the Mediterranean is the epitome of the science of the world.
— Edward Forbes, The Natural History of the European Seas
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burnThe living record of your memory. 'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmityShall you pace forth; your praise shall still find roomEven in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom.So, till the judgment that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
That's just the way it is. I'll always remember. She's forgotten.
— Åsa Larsson, Sun Storm
We propose that use of the term “false memory” to describe errors in memory for details directly contributes to removing the social context of abuse from research on memory for trauma. As the term “false memories” has increasingly been used to describe errors in details, the scientific weight of the term has increased. In turn, we see that the term “false memories” is treated as a construct supported by scientific fact, whereas other terms associated with questions about the veracity of abuse memories have been treated as suspect. For example, “recovered memories” often appears in quotations, whereas “false memories” does not (Campbell, 2003).The quotation marks suggest that one term is questioned, whereas the other is accepted as fact. Accepting “false memories” of abuse as fact reflects the subtle assimilation of the term into the cognitive literature, where the term is used increasingly to describe intrusions of semantically related words into lists of related words. The term, rooted in the controversy over the accuracy of abuse memories recalled during psychotherapy (Schacter, 1999), implies generalization of errors in details to memory for abuse—experienced largely by women and children (Campbell, 2003)."from: What's in a Name for Memory Errors? Implications and Ethical Issues Arising From the Use of the Term “False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior
— Jennifer J. Freyd
Tick-Tock Tick-Tock Memory The tick tock tick tocks goes the clockThe memory in my heart not aged but I am aged,As the tick tock tick tock goes on.
— Sarvesh Murthi .D.D
Wish for the best, prepare for the worst
— Ary Hidayat
He'd kept his figure despite being past his first youth. Pretty good for nearly forty.Who was she fooling? She knew quite well that he was thirty-five and a half, exactly five years older than she. Their birthdays were two days apart. It was absurd the way trivial facts lingered in the memory, facts as unimportant as what she had for dinner on Tuesday. Except that she couldn't remember last week's menu and she was annoyingly aware of Max Quinton's preference for lamb over beef, for apple tart over syllabub. He preferred Shakespeare to the modern poets, the country to the town.
— Miranda Neville, The Second Seduction of a Lady
Unassuming in manner, genial and kindly in his intercourse with his fellow-men, never showing impatience or irritation, devoid of personal ambition of the baser sort or of the slightest desire to exalt himself... In the minds of those who knew him, the greatness of his intellectual achievements will never overshadow the beauty and dignity of his life.[H.A. Burnstead's comments on the life of esteemed scientist J. Willard Gibbs]
— Henry Andrews Bumstead
Memory will lay its hands upon your breast, and you will understand my hatred.
— Gwendolyn B. Bennett
Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
I was going to be a memory when I grew up.
— Alejandro Zambra
I'm in my 40s and I'm constantly surprised by how much my childhood still plays a part in my life.
— Sara Sheridan
You bring fresh eyes, Matt. For us, something crazy may happen, and we all say 'Oh my' at the time, but the next week some new crazy thing happens that wipes the memory clean. And we go on to the next. La-di-da. I guess we just forgot about that other incident until now."- spoken by Sara, the missionary doctor, to Matt.(from The Sacrament of the Goddess, 2014)
— Joe Niemczura, The Sacrament of the Goddess
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.
— Grace Fiorre, The Nothing Spirit: Nothing is Everything
Sincerity and gravity, in Magnus's opinion, were highly overrated, as was being forced to relive unpleasant memories. He would much rather be amused and amusing.
— Cassandra Clare, The Bane Chronicles
Better to leave him with the memory of their being a pair of monsters, wrapped in each other's arms.
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
How does she do it? She makes it sound like she is so cut up to be giving them this information, and it's all just bumph out of her head. She never told them ANYTHING. I don't think she's given them the right name of any airfield in Britain except Mainsend and Buscot, which of course were where she was stationed. They could have easily checked. It's all so close to truth, and so glib--her aircraft identification is rather good considering what a fuss she makes about it. It makes me think of the first day I met her, giving those directions in German. So cool and crisp, such authority--suddenly she really was a radio operator, a German radio operator, she was so good at faking it. Or when I told her to be Jamie, how she just suddenly turned into Jamie.This confession of hers is rotten with error...
— Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity
It’s not magic. I remember because I make comparisons. Not in terms of better or worse, just different. And not all of these memories are great, but they’re mine.Which lends way to believe, that none of our lives are put together on an assembly line. We’re not pre-packaged with memories or programmed with stories. We have to make our own.
— Shane L. Koyczan
Of course she wants him to forget her. The last place she wants to reside is in his thoughts. What an unpleasant place to be.
— Donna Lynn Hope
But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.
— Julian Barnes, Talking It Over
Except heaven is a hope , and eden is a memory .
— Craig Thompson, Blankets
The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Everyone has their invisible cloak of all things past.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
The beast lives unhistorically; for it 'goes into' the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
But then, not long after, in another article, Loftus writes, "We live in a strange and precarious time that resembles at its heart the hysteria and superstitious fervor of the witch trials." She took rifle lessons and to this day keeps the firing instruction sheets and targets posted above her desk. In 1996, when Psychology Today interviewed her, she burst into tears twice within the first twenty minutes, labile, lubricated, theatrical, still whip smart, talking about the blurry boundaries between fact and fiction while she herself lived in another blurry boundary, between conviction and compulsion, passion and hyperbole. "The witch hunts," she said, but the analogy is wrong, and provides us with perhaps a more accurate window into Loftus's stretched psyche than into our own times, for the witch hunts were predicated on utter nonsense, and the abuse scandals were predicated on something all too real, which Loftus seemed to forget: Women are abused. Memories do matter. Talking to her, feeling her high-flying energy the zeal that burns up the center of her life, you have to wonder, why. You are forced to ask the very kind of question Loftus most abhors: did something bad happen to her? For she herself seems driven by dissociated demons, and so I ask. What happened to you? Turns out, a lot. (refers to Dr. Elizabeth F. Loftus)
— Lauren Slater, Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century
Consult your memory to know what matters most in your life.
— Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
As it is?
— Harold Pinter, No Man's Land
When the battery in my watch died, I still wore it. There was something about the watch that said: It doesn’t matter what time it is. Think in months. Years. Someone loves you. Where are you going? There are some things you will never do. It doesn’t matter. There is no rush. Be the best prisoner you can be.
— Chris Huntington
At a certain point, memory begins to be a burden.
— Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object
She has a memory of trees and fields and nothing more.
— James Thurber, The White Deer
Memory results from a process of continual re-categorization which, by its nature, must be procedural and involve continual motor activity and repeated rehearsal.
— Gerald Edelman
Stains tell a story,” Zac said, waving his arms as he spoke. “My car is full of random stains.
— Shana Norris, The Boyfriend Thief
Even in forgetting there is an aspect of recollection, a faded few moments of wispy consciousness clung like webs in high-vaulted chambers, moving ever so lightly with the draft.
— Jeffrey Panzer, Epoch Awakening
I saw [Linus Pauling] as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century’s greatest chemist. No doubt about it.
— Max F. Perutz
Now I stand before houses seton our secret trail, the haunt of arrowheadsand lost Indians the color of small plums,rooms in which the new boys play, tamedby computers and a summer waste of games,where once, in these woods, we tasted wild fruit.
— Thomas Dukes, Baptist Confidential
It seemed to him that love was like a great fire, and that people went flying here and there among the flame and smoke seeking wildly for some rich jewel; and when they found it the flame died down; and, in the end, time polished the jewel into a calm beautiful thing. And the two who had found it sometimes forgot about this jewel of love, and that they ever possessed it, or shared it with each other. But sometimes, toward the end of their lives, they remembered about love once more, and opened the casket of memory in which it lay, faded but still beautiful, and looked at it again before they went their ways.
— Lynn Doyle
The concept of Time is but the span of our memory.
— Marie Sabillo
Freud could never be certain, he said,in view of   his wide and early reading,whether what seemed like a new creationmight not be the work insteadof   hidden channels of memory leadingback to the notions of others absorbed,coming now anew into formhe’d almost known within him was growing.He called it (the ghost of a) cryptomnesia.So we own and owe what we know.
— Peter Cole
Maybe you are a memory who is supposed to live forever.
— Saleem Sharma
Alterations in regulation of affect (emotion) and impulse:Almost all people who are seriously traumatized have problems in tolerating and regulating their emotions and surges or impulses. However, those with complex PTSD and dissociative disorders tend to have more difficulties than those with PTSD because disruptions in early development have inhibited their ability to regulate themselves.The fact that you have a dissociative organization of your personality makes you highly vulnerable to rapid and unexpected changes in emotions and sudden impulses. Various parts of the personality intrude on each other either through passive influence or switching when your under stress, resulting in dysregulation. Merely having an emotion, such as anger, may evoke other parts of you to feel fear or shame, and to engage in impulsive behaviors to stop avoid the feelings.
— Suzette Boon, Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists
Changes in Meaning:Finally, chronically traumatized people lose faith that good things can happen and people can be kind and trustworthy. They feel hopeless, often believing that the future will be as bad as the past, or that they will not live long enough to experience a good future. People who have a dissociative disorder may have different meanings in various dissociative parts. Some parts may be relatively balanced in their worldview, others may be despairing, believing the world to be a completely negative, dangerous place, while other parts might maintain an unrealistic optimistic outlook on life
— Suzette Boon, Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists
Changes in the Perception of Self:People who have been traumatized in childhood are often troubled by guilt, shame, and negative feelings about themselves, such as the belief they are unlikable, unlovable, stupid, inept, dirty, worthless, lazy, and so forth. In Complex Dissociative disorders there are typically particular parts that contain these negative feelings about the self while other parts may evaluate themselves quite differently. Alterations among parts thus may result in rather rapid and distinct changes in self perception.
— Suzette Boon, Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists
Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel says we are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember. Who am I, then, if my memory is impaired?
— Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace
People with Complex PTSD suffer from more severe and frequent dissociation symptoms, as well as memory and attention problems, than those with simple PTSD. In addition to amnesia due to the activity of various parts of the self, people may experience difficulties with concentration, attention, other memory problems and general spaciness. These symptoms often accompany dissociation of the personality, but they are also common in people who do not have dissociative disorders. For example everyone can be spacey, absorbed in an activity, or miss an exit on the highway. When various parts of the personality are active, by definition, a person experiences some kind of abrupt change in attention and consciousness.
— Suzette Boon, Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists
The most important things, the experiences that leave marks on our souls for everyone to see, those marks that reflect our most intense emotions in a glass pane, we will never forget.
— Allie Burke, Paper Souls
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.
— Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Something about her in this moment strikes him as being familiar. The motion of her arm? The shape of her hand? The wrinkle of her upper lip? He does not know. Nor does he have any way to tell whether what he is sensing is a fragment of memory, a fragment of an idea of a memory, or something his mind, desperate for connections, has created on its own.
— Doug Dorst, S.
And like an aviator who rolls painfully along the ground until, abruptly, he breaks away from it, I felt myself being slowly lifted towards the silent peaks of memory.
— Marcel Proust, Time Regained
There's nothing like a re-creation of the event. Which is lucky. Think if one could fully remember perfume or kisses! How wearisome the reality of them would be!
— Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza
But the windows of the house of Memory, and the windows of the house of Mercy, are not so easily closed as windows of glass and wood. They fly open unexpectedly; they rattle in the night; they must be nailed up. Mr. The Englishman had tried nailing them, but had not driven the nails quite home. So he passed but a disturbed evening and a worse night.
— Charles Dickens, Christmas Stories
Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
I'd been feeling like this for a while, the continual looking back, the stuckness of it all. I blamed it on the coming New Year, only four and a half months away, when the clocks would read zero and we would start again, could start again, but I knew we wouldn't. Nothing would. The world would be the same, just a little bit worse.
— Sarah Winman, When God Was a Rabbit
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.
— Michael Salter, Organised  Sexual Abuse
Batley insisted that no cult existed but the jury found him guilty of 35 offences including 11 rapes. three indecent assaults, causing prostitution for personal gain, causing a child to have sex and inciting a child to have sex. The three women, who got Egyptian Eye of Horus tattoos apparently to show their allegiance to their organisation, were found guilty of sex-related charges. Young boys and girls were procured by cult members to take part in sex sessions, the trial heard. The group preyed on vulnerable youngsters, impelling them to join with veiled death threats. Batley was accused of forcing a number of his victims into prostitution. (Morris 2011) There are, after all, no paedophile rings; there is no ritual abuse; recovered memories cannot he trusted; not all victimization claims are legitimate. (Pratt 2009: 70)
— Michael Salter, Organised  Sexual Abuse
Forgotten hero was never the real hero, real hero can not be forgotten.
— Amit Kalantri
One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.
— Clifton Fadiman
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.
— Michael Salter, Organised  Sexual Abuse
It had felt as if I were truly awake for the first time, true knowledge running like ice in my blood.The memory exhilirated me for a moment, then left me with a broken cord of loss.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
Or maybe we'll make a home somewhere inside ourselves, to carry with us wherever we go- which is the way I carry my mother now.
— Veronica Roth, Allegiant
I am a people watcher and I have a very good memory.
— Brian Jacques, Taggerung
Remembering the past always comes with an image or a view attached.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects
People's lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and... well, sometimes they can't talk about them.
— Alan Moore, Watchmen
The path of memory is neither straight or safe, and we travel down it at our risk.
— Neil Gaiman, The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch
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.
— Paul R. Halmos
Listen. You know what it's like when you're in a room with the light on and then suddenly the light goes out? I'll show you. It's like this."He turns out the light.BLACKOUT
— Harold Pinter, No Man's Land
Reunion with the mother is a siren call haunting our imagination. Once there was bliss, and now there is struggle. Dim memories of life before the traumatic separation of birth may be the source of Arcadian fantasies of a lost golden age.
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
When a Truthsayer's gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory - in her body's memory. We look down so many avenues of the past... but only feminine avenues... Yet there's a place no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot - into both feminine and masculine pasts... Many men have tried the drug... so many, but none has succeeded.""They tried and failed, all of them?""They tried and died.
— Frank Herbert, Dune
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.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
A full moon, although less splendid than that earlier on,lit everything around. Before I reached the point where I would have to leave the road and set off across country, the narrow path I was following seemed suddenly to end and disappear behind a large hedge, and there before me, as if blocking my way, stood a single, tall tree, very dark at first against the transparently clear night sky. Out of nowhere, a breeze got up. It set the tender stems of the grasses shivering, made the green blades of the reeds shudder and sent a ripple across the brown waters of a puddle. Like a wave, it lifted up the spreading branches of the tree and, murmuring, climbed the trunk, and then, suddenly, the leaves turned their undersides to the moon and the whole beech tree (because it was a beech) was covered in white as far as the topmost branch.It was only a moment, no more than that, but the memory of it will last as long as my life lasts.
— José Saramago
It takes a day to fall in love and a lifetime to forget.
— Chris Nicolaisen, The Life and Death of the Ericsons
One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.
— Colum McCann
Kid, if you never remember your dreams you lose out on half of your life
— Carla Speed McNeil, Finder, Vol. 02: Sin-Eater 2
Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure-an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment:is it not?
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
The flame of the inn is dim tonight,Too many vacant chairs.The sun has lost too much of its light,Too many songs have taken flight,Too many ghosts on the stairs.Charon, here's to you as man against man,I wish I could pick 'em the way you can!
— Grantland Rice
His mind turned, gradually comprehending, memories flooding his awareness that were not his own: memories from the timelessness before the Being within him had fallen into this body; of a Homeworld and a Consortium of Light that had sent two Beings away to prove themselves worthy—of one another and of their place in their own world.
— J. Valor, Salome
Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.
— Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
Piper: it looks like we have hole. Percy: Yeah we've got a dam hole! (LOL-ing) Piper: What! Percy: Inside joke. (still LOL-ing) Piper: Whatever.
— Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena
Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
And you might try to hide or protect yourself, or compare the different states of love,but you must not grow up, must not act wise when it comes to love.You must stay foolish and fall for every heart will beat in different ways together with yours and love is not meant to be compared, only enjoyed, and suffered, and remembered.
— Charlotte Eriksson
Life demands more thinking than remembering.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit
So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.
— Helen Keller
If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.
— Julian Barnes, Talking It Over
He loves me so he hurts meTo try and make me good.It doesn't work. I'm just too badAnd don't do what I should.My memory has so many different sections and, like all survivors, there are so many compartments with so many triggers. I'll remember a smell which reminds me of a man which reminds me of a place which reminds me of another man who I think was with a woman who had a certain smell — and I'm back to square one. This is the case for most survivors, I believe. When we try to put together our pasts, the triggers are many and varied, the memories are disjointed — and why wouldn't they be? We were children. Even someone with an idyllic childhood who is only trying to remember the lovely things which happened to them will scratch their head and wonder who gave them that doll and was it for Christmas or their third birthday? Did they have a party when they were four or five? When did they go on a plane for the first time? You see, even happy memories are hard to piece together — so imagine how hard it is to collate all of the trauma, to pull together all of the things I've been trying to push away for so many years.
— Laurie Matthew, Groomed: An Uncle Who Went Too Far, a Mother Who Didn't Care, a Little Girl Who Waited for Justice
If it were not my purpose to combine barbarian things with things Hellenic, to traverse and civilize every continent, to search out the uttermost parts of land and sea, to push the bounds of Macedonia to the farthest Ocean, and to disseminate and shower the blessings of the Hellenic justice and peace over every nation, I should not be content to sit quietly in the luxury of idle power, but I should emulate the frugality of Diogenes. But as things are, forgive me Diogenes, that I imitate Herakles, and emulate Perseus, and follow in the footsteps of Dionysos, the divine author and progenitor of my family, and desire that victorious Hellenes should dance again in India and revive the memory of the Bacchic revels among the savage mountain tribes beyond the Kaukasos…
— Alexander the Great
My short-term factual memory can be like water; events are a brief disturbance on the surface and then it closes back up again, as if nothing ever touched it. But it’s a strange fact that my long-term memory remains strong, perhaps because it recorded events when my mind was unaffected. My emotional memory is intact too, perhaps because feelings are recorded and stored in a different place than facts. The things that happened deeper in the past, and deeper in the breast, are still there for me, under the water. I won 1,098 games, and eight national championships, and coached in four different decades. But what I see are not the numbers. I see their faces. 'Pat should get a tattoo!' The kids laughed. 'What kind should she get?' 'A heart. She should get a heart.' Little did they know. They are the tattoos.
— Pat Summitt, Sum It Up: 1,098 Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective
If she’d had any doubts he was a real deal country boy, they disappeared when he unabashedly stripped down to nothing—the sun had kissed his arms to mid-bicep, although his torso wasn’t without a faint tan. She’d thought lazily that maybe he had a pond. She’d like to go skinny dipping with him. Leap onto his back and wrap her legs around his lean hips. Hold on to his broad shoulders and press her naked breasts into his back and drift into the cool water together.As he opened his button-fly jeans, revealing snug briefs underneath, she’d whispered for him to stop. He was hard and sinewy in all the right places, with shadows and valleys she wanted to explore with her mouth and hands and eyes, but her touch first went to the line where dark faded to light on his arm, neatly following the curve of his muscles. “Nice farmer’s tan.
— Zoe York, Between Then and Now
Moving on, while he wondered, the dark through which Mr. Lecky's light cut grew more beautiful with scents. Particles of solid matter so minute, gases so subtle, that they filtered through stopping and sealing, hung on the unstirred air. Drawn in with Mr. Lecky's breath came impalpable dews cooked out of disintegrating coal. Distilled, chemically split and reformed, they ended in flawless simulation of the aromas of gums, the scent of woods and the world's flowers. The chemists who made them could do more than that. Loose on the gloom were perfumes of flowers which might possibly have bloomed but never had, and the strong-smelling saps of trees either lost or not yet evolved.Mixed in the mucus of the pituitary membrane, these volatile essences meant more than synthetic chemistry to Mr. Lecky. Their microscopic slime coated the bushed-out ends of the olfactory nerve; their presence was signaled to the anterior of the brain's temporal lobe. At once, thought waited on them, tossing down from the great storehouse of old images, neglected ideas - sandalwood and roses, musk and lavender. Mr. Lecky stood still, wrung by pangs as insistent and unanswerable as hunger. He was prodded by the unrest of things desired, not had; the surfeit of things had, not desired. More than anything he could see, or words, or sounds, these odors made him stupidly aware of the past. Unable to remember it, whence he was, or where he had previously been, all that was sweet, impermanent and gone came back not spoiled by too much truth or exact memory. Volatile as the perfumes, the past stirred him with longing for what was not - the only beloved beauty which you will have to see but which you may not keep.Mr. Lecky's beam of light went through glass top and side of a counter, displayed bottles of colored liquid - straw, amber, topaz - threw shadows behind their diverse shapes. He had no use for perfume. All the distraction, all the sense of loss and implausible sweetness which he felt was in memory of women.Behind the counter, Mr. Lecky, curious, took out bottles, sniffed them, examined their elaborately varied forms - transparent squares, triangles, cones, flattened ovals. Some were opaque, jet or blue, rough with embedded metals in intricate design. This great and needless decoration of the flasks which contained it was one strange way to express the inexpressible. Another way was tried in the names put on the bottles. Here words ran the suggestive or symbolic gamut of idealized passion, or festive night, of desired caresses, or of abstractions of the painful allure yet farther fetched.Not even in the hopeful, miracle-raving fancy of those who used the perfumes could a bottle of liquid have any actual magic. Since the buyers at the counters must be human beings, nine of every ten were beyond this or other help. Women, young, but unlovely and unloved, women, whatever they had been, now at the end of it and ruined by years or thickened to caricature by fat, ought to be the ones called to mind by perfume. But they were not. Mr. Lecky held the bottle in his hand a long while, aware of the tenth woman.
— James Gould Cozzens
I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.
— Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life
This seems to have been St. Augustine's very notion of "memory," not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing.
— Richard Rohr
I don't want to break my memories with you.
— Arzum Uzun
Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one's life, mountains' forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one's own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back through oneself, this path we call the present tense, which becomes the continental divide when the tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded must sometime feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms.
— Dan Beachy-Quick, An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky
smell is one of the key to unlock our momories
— Sabeesh Yemmay
For now I sit on my final island of the present as my radius of memory shrinks; lost already are the islands of work, of old friendships...Other islands fade as I brood upon them.
— Chuma Nwokolo, The Ghost of Sani Abacha
Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.
— Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
The green of these mountains in my lungs smelled like an old friend, one who wouldn't tell lies to you. One who understood. One who knew pain didn't go away just because you wanted it to. And when I exhaled, only the sweet scent of smoke and s dry mouth remained. But the scent was enough to rekindle the memory.
— Jason Jack Miller, Hellbender
Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.
— Lynne Sharon Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory: Conversations With W. G. Sebald
As she ran, a memory uncurled in her mind and spread out before her and it felt like she was running into the memory.
— J.C. Morrows, Taken
Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone.
— Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
In a sense, he thought, all we consist of is memories. Our personalities are constructed from memories, our lives are organized around memories, our cultures are built upon the foundation of shared memories that we call history and science.
— Michael Crichton, Sphere
People usually will remember people most, for the stupid things they did, than the impressionable ones. This somehow strangely, makes them feel better.
— Anthony Liccione
Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is the line we pay out behind us as we travel through time--it is the clue, like Ariadne's, which means we do not lose our way. Memory is the lasso with which we capture the past and haul it from chaos towards us in nicely ordered sequences, like those of baroque keyboard music.
— Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories
Memory is curated. All this paraphernalia you collect to ward off forgetting
— Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls
At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life.
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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 they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
Just as sometimes I wondered if Grandpa had ever existed, sometimes I wondered if I truly existed myself. As I was running, I could see myself from outside myself: a skinny girl with the flapping shorts and too- big a T-shirt, always watching the other girls at school, a girl in a pink bedroom sitting with a book propped on her knees, the words she was reading entering her mind, some sticking like gluey never to be forgotten, others disappearing instantly, I could remember everything and remember nothing. I would watch a movie and recall every scene as if I had written the script, then watch another movie another day and be unable to recall it at all.
— Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
Because who can describe the look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?
— John Irving, A Widow for One Year