Fabricated Memory Quotes

All events of the past withered to mere skeletons, veined and fleshed of fancy. ~ Ashim Shanker

Ferrari: How odd, Borges, it seems that we are talking constantly through memory. Sometimes, our conversations remind me of a dialogue between two memories.
Borges: In fact, that's what it is. If we are something, we are our past, aren't we? Our past is not what can be recorded in a biography or in the newspapers. Our past is our memory. That memory can be hidden or inaccurate - it doesn't matter. It's there, isn't it? It can be a lie but that lie becomes part of our memory, part of us. (Conversations, Vol. 1) ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Forgetting is the precious balm that helps us to travel on, past the depredations of memory. ~ Jesse Ball

Hope dares to imagine the future as a legitimate alternative to the vicious repetitions of the past. But the refusal to forgive is a toxic memory that endlessly pulls the painful past into the present. The toxic memory of the unforgiven past poisons the present and contaminates the future. This toxic ~ Brian Zahnd

„All effective propaganda", Hitler wrote, „must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas." The stereotyped formulas must be constantly repeated for „only constant repetition will finally succeed in im printing an idea upon the memory of a crowd." Philosophy teaches us to feel uncertain about the things that seems to us self-evident. Propaganda, on the other hand, teaches us to accept as self-evident matters about which it would be reasonable to suspend our judgement or to feel doubt. ~ Aldous Huxley

Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears. ~ Rollo May

With his fingers, he followed the shape of her chin, her jaw, and learned her features, committing them to memory. Her face was small, her bones fragile. Exquisite. ~ Sofia Grey

Actually, the only memory I have of being a Cub Scout was trying to get my hat back. That was all I did. Run back and forth at my bus stop going "Quit it." ~ Jerry Seinfeld

I don't believe everything happens for a reason. But I still search for reasons anyway. It's like I don't want to admit that maybe everything really is totally random ... that people are just molecules in the air, bumping into each other and floating away again.
-p150, NOTES TO SELF ~ Avery Sawyer

Let no man dare, when I am dead. to charge me with dishonor; let no man attaint my memory by believing that I could have engaged in any cause but that of my country's liberty and independence, or that I could have become the pliant minion of power in the oppression or the miseries of my countrymen. ~ Robert Emmet

There is a part of everything which is unexplored,
because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown. ~ Guy De Maupassant

Maybe, like Tony Amsterdam, you have seen a vision of God that is gone only temporarily; withdrawn, she thought, rather than ended. Maybe inside the terribly burned and burning circuits of your head that char more and more, even as I hold you, a spark of color and light in some disguised form manifested itself, unrecognized, to lead you, by its memory, through the years to come, the dreadful years ahead. A word not fully understood, some small thing seen but not understood; some fragment of a star mixed with the trash of this world, to guide you by reflex until the day...but it was so remote. She could not herself truly imagine it. Mingled with the commonplace, something from another world perhaps had appeared to Bob Arctor before it was over. All she could do now was hold him and hope. ~ Philip K. Dick

Happiness is in love, in service, and in beautiful memory. ~ Debasish Mridha

I retain a searing memory of the smell of fresh varnish on wooden floors, and the feeling that I was entering incarceration as I stepped through the door for my first day of kindergarten. ~ James Edwin Turner

But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilisation, and out of a half-visualised succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego. ~ Anonymous

The mind can also be kind and does blot out those episodes of our existence that we can't erase in our consciousness. ~ F. Sionil Jose

I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body perfectly, everything smooth and sleek and luxurious, and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of torture- like she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy. ~ Jon Ronson

He's not learning. He's not experiencing. He's remembering.
He walks to the next screen, hungry to be himself again. ~ James Dashner

The accuracy of my memories, whether things happened exactly the way that the personalities remember, doesn't really matter. If my memory, combined with the memories of the other personalities, provides some coherent past, then that is far better than the blankness I have. Whatever inaccuracies may occur because of the passage of time or because of the colored intensity of "emotional truth" harm no one. All that matters is that I gain a firm grasp on what is real. (165) ~ Joan Frances Casey

Jesus. The taste of her-my memory was unforgivably inadequate. I feel like a recovering crack addict who just fell off the wagon and never wants to climb back on. ~ Emma Chase

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.
[A Conversation with Alice Munro, BookBrowse, 1998] ~ Alice Munro

Sophie, what will you do to help Josh,to save him, to bring him back?" Tsagaglalal asked.
"Anything. Everything." Perenelle leaned forward to place both forearms on the table. Her hands were tightly locked together, knuckles white with tension. "And Sophie, what do you think I will do to help my husband?"
"Anything," Sophie said again. "Everything."
"We will do anything-everything-to help those we love. That is what seperates the humani from the Next Generation of the Elders or those who came before them. That is what makes us human.That is why the race thrives; it is why the race will always survive."
"But that type of love requires sacrifice," Tsagaglalal said slowly.
"Sometimes extraordinary sacrifices..."
The old woman's gray eyes suddenly swam with huge tears.
And Sophie had a flickering memory of a woman-younger, so much younger, but with the same high cheekbones and gray eyes of Tsagaglalal-turning away from a tall golden statue. The woman stopped and looked back, and Sophie discovered that the statue's bright gray eyes were alive and were following the woman. Then Tsagaglalal turned and raced down endless glass stairs. She was clutching a book in both hands: the Codex. And her tears dripped onto the metal surface. ~ Michael Scott

Memory deludes me. I have just remembered something that I completely forgot after it happened. I remembered it again when I was about sixteen, and then I forgot it again. And this morning I remembered not the event itself but the previous recollection, which itself was more than forty years ago, as though an old moon were reflected in a windowpane from which it was reflected in a lake, from where memory draws not the reflection itself, which no longer exists, but only its whitened bones. ~ Amos Oz

Everyone has experienced laughing at a funeral, and not even inappropriately. It could be a response to a moment of absurdity or some fond memory. We're human beings so we understand that laughter and crying aren't always disparate emotions. ~ Harold Ramis

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text. ~ Walter Benjamin

... Look, I'm real sorry about Cheryl, I know you loved her a lot," Mandy apologized gloomily. "It's wrong that people have to keep killing off Pollution."
"It's alright, I think she wants to be remediated," Alecto told her calmly, though his grief-stricken and depressed expression said more to Mandy than his words did.
"You don't have to forget Cheryl, no matter what Mearth said to you," Mandy pointed out. "People shouldn't be forced to forget what they love, or to just get over the death of what they love. Cheryl was your friend and nobody can make you forget her if you don't want to. ~ Rebecca McNutt

When I am alone
You'll come back to me
It's happened before
It's called memory

I'm not even sure
If I know where to start
But starting is second
First we must part
I'm too tired now
To fight anymore
We're saying goodbye
At the innermost door ~ Leonard Cohen

All of them are gone except for me; and for me nothing is gone. ~ Randall Jarrell

Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary. ~ Maurice Baring

He was careful to instruct him in such an affable, kind, and gentle way, that he easily prevailed with him to consider studying, not so much as a duty of obedience to his superiors, but as the way to purchase for himself a most delightsom and invaluable good. In effect, he soon created in Philaretus so strong a passion to acquire knowledge, that what time he could spare from a scholar's task, which his retentive memory made him not find uneasy, he would usually employ so greedily in reading, that his master would sometimes be necessitated to force him out to play, on which, and upon study, he looked, as if their natures were inverted. ~ Robert Boyle

Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. ~ W.G. Sebald

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination. ~ Oliver Sacks

Sometimes, inflexibility creates a callus, scarring over all the bitterness and disappointment improperly, and there is no honest way to break that silence or that infinite distance, not even in death, not even in memory. ~ Víctor Del Árbol

I have short-term memory loss. I know that some of the memories of the Super Bowl championships are fading. ~ Pat Bowlen

Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do. ~ Stefan Zweig

The world is aware how jealously the Jewish community guards the Holocaust, both as a memory and a weapon. ~ David Klinghoffer

My work is mostly about memory. It is very important to me that everybody that I have been close to in my life I make photographs of them. ~ Nan Goldin

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone. ~ Terry Pratchett

Then very haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily, he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in his life, the haunting memory of a beauty and a happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings, that made all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him. ~ H.G.Wells