Never Forget

Sunday, September 14, 2014 – Never Forget

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us. ~ Oscar Wilde

Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future. ~ Lewis B. Smedes

If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today. ~ E. Joseph Cossman

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Every man’s memory is his private literature. ~ Aldous Huxley

As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape. ~ John Lancaster Spalding

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. ~ Edward de Bono

Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food. ~ Austin O’Malley

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. ~ Saul Bellow

Memory itself is an internal rumor. ~ George Santayana

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don’t come to mind when we want them. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In memory’s telephoto lens, far objects are magnified. ~ John Updike

The happiest memories are of moments that ended when they should have. ~ Robert Brault

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory. ~ Tim O’Brien

The repressed memory is like a noisy intruder being thrown out of the concert hall. You can throw him out, but he will bang on the door and continue to disturb the concert. The analyst opens the door and says, If you promise to behave yourself, you can come back in. ~ Theodor Reik

We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us. ~ Eric Hoffer

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

In memory everything seems to happen to music. ~ Tennessee Williams

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going. ~ Tennessee Williams

I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me. ~ Noel Coward

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person? ~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Observation is an old man’s memory. ~ Jonathan Swift

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness. ~ Andre Gide

Language is memory and metaphor. ~ Storm Jameson

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true. ~ D. H. Lawrence

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

I’ve been to too many Dead concerts. There’ve been smokin’ holes where my memory used to be. ~ Ken Kesey

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. ~ Milan Kundera

We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory. ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget. ~ John Berger

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. ~ Annie Dillard

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves. ~ Denis Diderot

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I been in the blues all my life. I’m still delivering ’cause I got a long memory. ~ Muddy Waters

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory. ~ Antonio Porchia

The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing. ~ Augusto Roa Bastos

The very idea of carrying my memory into eternity devastated me, and I took refuge in atheism. ~ Taylor Caldwell

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold. ~ John Leonard

A good storyteller is a person with a good memory and hopes other people haven’t. ~ Irvin S. Cobb

Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before. ~ Steven Wright

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before. ~ John Green

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. ~ Virginia Woolf

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

A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory. ~ Mark Twain

Only those with no memory insist on their originality. ~ Coco Chanel

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while. ~ William Butler Yeats

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. ~ Alan Watts

If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next – and disappear. That’s why it’s so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives. ~ Joshua Foer

The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting. ~ Milan Kundera, Slowness

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time. ~ David Eagleman

If one wishes to be instructed–not that anyone does–concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. Time: the whisper beneath that word is death. With this unanswerable weight hanging heavier and heavier over one’s head, the vision becomes cloudy. Nothing is what it seems… How then, can I trust my memory concerning that particular Sunday afternoon? … Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true – anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other – beneath the face of the beloved, however ancient, ruined, and scarred, is the face of the baby your love once was, and will always be, for you. Love serves, then, if memory doesn’t, and passion, apart from its tense relation to agony, labors beneath the shadow of death. Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you’re out there in the craft of your mortality, alone. ~ James Baldwin, Just Above My Head

Memory is the thing you forget with. ~ Alexander Chase

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