Sunday, May 19, 2019 – The Persistent Past
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. ~ Søren Kierkegaard
When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
The past is never where you think you left it. ~ Katherine Anne Porter
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. ~ William Faulkner
The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know. ~ Harry S. Truman
My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder. ~ William Golding
No man is rich enough to buy back his past. ~ Oscar Wilde
When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction. ~ Stephen King
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. ~ George Orwell, 1984
When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable. ~ Martin Amis
Memory is the thing you forget with. ~ Alexander Chase
Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us. ~ Oscar Wilde
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
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 world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory. ~ Tim O’Brien
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
If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today. ~ E. Joseph Cossman
We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us. ~ Eric Hoffer
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
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
A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. ~ Edward de Bono
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
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
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. ~ William Faulkner
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
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes 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
I been in the blues all my life. I’m still delivering ’cause I got a long memory. ~ Muddy Waters
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
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
Just Above Sunset 