Faulty Memories Quotes

Do you know where you were on Thursday evening at about eight o'clock last week, and who you were with, and what you were doing? Are you absolutely certain beyond any shadow of a doubt? Would you bet your life on it? If there is any possibility - no matter how slim or remote - that you could possibly be mistaken about such a thing, you are the kind of person who should never agree to talk to the police under just about any circumstances for as long as you live. And that includes practically everybody. ~ James Duane

99 percent of every beautiful thing you ever knew escaped and went back out into the world where you vaguely remembered it. ~ Ron Padgett

All things fell into the past but one; and what that was, was love. ~ Justin Cronin

Come into my lap and sit in the center of your soul. Drink the living waters of memory and give birth to yourself. What you unearth with stun you. You will paint the walls of this cave in thanksgiving. ~ Meinrad Craighead

Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as
my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories
fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

After a time, it seemed that the world inside the books became my world. So when I thought of my childhood, it was dandelion wine and ice cream on a summer porch, like Ray Bradbury, and catching catfish with Huck Finn. My own memories receded and the book memories became the real memories, far more than the outside, far more even than in here. ~ Rene Denfeld

I'VE NOTICED, FROM MY EXPERIENCE, IF THE EXTERNAL, EMOTIONAL CONSTRUCTION OF IMAGES IN A FILM ARE BASED ON THE FILMMAKER'S OWN MEMORY, ON THE KINSHIP OF ONE'S PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE FABRIC OF THE FILM, THEN THE FILM WILL HAVE THE POWER TO AFFECT THOSE WHO SEE IT. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Ironically, when I was playing in my first band, I would deliberately not write down any lyrics. I have a really good memory and I would just keep them in my head. ~ Craig Finn

My earliest memories are of CP4 - that's a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex directions, though the global topology's quite different. But I didn't really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this" - he motioned at the surrounding more-or-less-Euclidean space - for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even most Newtonian mechanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in a single three-dimensional space. ~ Greg Egan

It only took one imperfection. One. Then laughs would turn into screams [ ... ]. People would turn into memories and memories into nightmares. ~ Mahsa

In my hometown memories are fresh. ~ Adele

Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn't exist, all at the same time. ~ Robin Wasserman

It's strange indeed how memories can lie dormant in a man's mind for so many years. Yet those memories can be awakened and brought forth fresh and new, just by something you've seen, or something you've heard, or the sight of an old familiar face. ~ Wilson Rawls

What I'm putting forth," he said, "is that the four of us make some memories, become fast friends and abandon starchy old mind-sets about monogamy. The world's gone crazy. Let's do the same."
"The answer is no," Dad said. "And I'm surprised I'm not punching you. ~ George Saunders

Like an old photograph, time can make a feeling fade, but the memory of a first love never fades away. ~ Tim McGraw

I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible. ~ Thomas De Quincey

I think that people have short memories, and I think that they believe that our forbearers in the past were these Founding Fathers who were ideal and who were - would never have stooped to dirty tricks. ~ Joseph Cummins

Scots have long memories, and they're not the most forgiving of people. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Rose lived the same life I did, but she doesn't have PTSD. No bad dreams, no missing memories. Sometimes I'm jealous that she seems to deal with everything better than I do. But then I'll catch her with this hollow look in her eyes and think maybe she just disguises everything for my benefit.
Maybe she's broken on the inside too. ~ Paula Stokes

Did you know that the more you remember, the more you expand your perception of personal time? No, really. There's like studies and shit. Even though we can't outrun death, if we muscle up our memories the race, at least, will seem a little longer. That is, we'll still die, but we'll have lived more. Kind of comforting right? ~ Elizabeth Little

He was in his first year of law school when his life began appearing to him as memories. He would be doing something everyday - cooking dinner, filing books at the library, frosting a cake at Batter, looking up an article for Harold - and suddenly, a scene would appear before him, a dumb show meant only for him. In those years, the memories were tableaux, not narratives, and he would see a single one repeatedly for days: ~ Hanya Yanagihara

A great chess player always has a very good memory. ~ Leonid Shamkovich

All my memories are things I gave away, traded for new days after days after days... ~ Brenna Ehrlich

I fear no hell, just as I expect no heaven. Nabokov summed up a nonbeliever's view of the cosmos, and our place in it, thus: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." The 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle put it slightly differently: "One life. A little gleam of Time between two Eternities." Though I have many memories to cherish, I value the present, my time on earth, those around me now. I miss those who have departed, and recognize, painful as it is, that I will never be reunited with them. There is the here and now – no more. But certainly no less. Being an adult means, as Orwell put it, having the "power of facing unpleasant facts." True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we're lucky) to make the most of on this earth.

There is also something intrinsically courageous about being an atheist. Atheists confront death without mythology or sugarcoating. That takes courage. ~ Jeffrey Tayler

Here I am sitting in the back of a cab with Catherine Zeta-Jones who is telling me Michael Douglas has fond memories of me - it just makes me feel good as a human being. ~ John Schneider

Love isn't restricted by time because every minute and every second creates beautiful memories. ~ Jaejoong

Our old experiences, memories and fears guide us down the present path. It's not so much that you are the artist; you are the conduit. ~ Nick Bantock

The recorder consisted of a biochip smaller than the head of a pin implanted into the hippocampus and nanosensors embedded throughout the body. Normally, the system lay dormant. But as soon as it detected severe deviations from the norm in various brain activity parameters - indicative of the stress caused by imminent death or great danger - the black-box would automatically contact the police and record the short-term memory in the hippocampus via molecular scanning. In the event of death, about one to two minutes of memories preceding the cessation of brain activity could be decrypted from the black box. ~ Bao Shu

This preoccupation with the classics was the happiest thing that could have befallen me. It gave me a standard of values. To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education. ... Faulty though my own practice has always been, I learned sound doctrine - the virtue of a clean, bare style, of simplicity, of a hard substance and an austere pattern. Above all the Calvinism of my boyhood was broadened, mellowed, and also confirmed. For if the classics widened my sense of the joy of life they also taught its littleness and transience; if they exalted the dignity of human nature they insisted upon its frailties and the aidos with which the temporal must regard the eternal. I lost then any chance of being a rebel, for I became profoundly conscious of the dominion of unalterable law. ... Indeed, I cannot imagine a more precious viaticum than the classics of Greece and Rome, or a happier fate than that one's youth should be intertwined with their world of clear, mellow lights, gracious images, and fruitful thoughts. They are especially valuable to those who believe that Time enshrines and does not destroy, and who do what I am attempting to do in these pages, and go back upon and interpret the past. No science or philosophy can give that colouring, for such provide a schematic, and not a living, breathing universe. And I do not think that the mastery of other literatures can give it in a like degree, for they do not furnish the same totality of life - a complete world ~ John Buchan

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. ~ Tony Judt

If only memory were a library with everything stored where it should be. If only you could walk to the desk and say to the assistant, I'd like to return the painful memories about David Fry or indeed his mother and take out some happier ones, please. About stickleback fishing with my father. Or picnicking on the banks of the Cherwell when I was a student. And the assistant would say, Certainly, madam. We have all those. Under "F" for "Fishing." As well as "P" for "Picnicking." You'll find them on your left. ~ Rachel Joyce

Since Steve Jobs died I cannot bear to see anyone use an iPhone irreverently, what I did was a tribute to his memory. ~ Russell Brand

Images barraged him. Connections darted electric. Veins. Roots. Forked lightning. Tributaries. Branches. Vines snaked around trees, herds of animals, drops of water running together.

I don't understand.

Fingers twined together. Shoulder leaned on shoulder. Fist bumping fist. Hand dragging Adam up from the dirt.

Cabeswater rifled madly through Adam's own memories and flashed them through his mind. It hurled images of Gansey, Ronan, Noah, and Blue so fast that Adam couldn't keep up with all of them.

Then the grid of lightning blasted across the world, an illuminated grid of energy.

Adam still did not understand, and then he did.

There was more than one Cabeswater. Or more of whatever it was. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

This green place in which I stood with James turned slowly around us like a music box. All my memories returning, and all his. I could see and feel each of his days and he mine. Childhood songs, books read, hearts broken, arguments forgiven.The sweetness of these imperfections far outshining the regrets. Our lives overlapped as naturally as two blades of grass brushing together.
My pain forgotten, my clothes dry and clean, I pulled James close to me. As he lifted my chin, I felt no sensation of falling as when I had been Light touching one who is Quick. It wasn't the mere heat of a stolen moment in borrowed flesh. We touched now soul to soul, both of us Light. And when we kissed, the garden rocked, floating upstream. ~ Laura Whitcomb

They laughed much harder than the memory was funny because it felt good to laugh. ~ Shannon Hale

There are things you experience growing up in a small town that create memories that last a lifetime. ~ Carlos Wallace

Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Life is really very simple. In each moment, we have the opportunity to choose between saying "yes" or "no", to listen to our intuition, to listen to our true inner voice, the Existential voice within ourselves. When we say "yes", we have contact with Existence and we receive nourishment, love, joy, support and inspiration. When we say "no", we create a separation from life and begin to create dreams and expectations of how it should be. We begin to live in the memories of the past and in the fantasies of the future – as if any other time than here and now really could make us happy and satisfied. ~ Swami Dhyan Giten

Night-dreams trace on Memory's wall Shadows of the thoughts of day, And thy fortunes, as they fall, The bias of the will betray. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

All my people sing of are memories. And so I will remember this death. It will burden me as it does not burden my fellow students
I must not let that change. I must not become like them. I'll remember that every sin, every death, every sacrifice, is for freedom. ~ Pierce Brown

In my life I find that memories of the spirit linger and sweeten long after memories of the brain have faded. ~ Harry Connick, Jr.

My true glory is not to have won 40 battles ... Waterloo will erase the memory of so many victories, ... But ... what will live forever, is my Civil Code. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

And the memories of all we have loved stay and come back to us in the evening of our life. They are not dead but sleep, and it is well to gather a treasure of them. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

I was overjoyed two weeks later when I received 6 letter pages back from Alex. Three of which were devoted to memories of the times in Alex's childhood when he'd been intimidated by boys in sewage tunnels and of the violence that ensued. After the passage in which Alex detailed the anatomy of the human nose and how weak it is in comparison to a swiftly butted forehead, I asked him just exactly who I had become pen pals with…. ~ Trent Dalton

One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries. You don't want to forget your identity. I am glad that you were great in the fourteenth century, but that was then and this is now. When memories exceed dreams, the end is near. The hallmark of a truly successful organization is the willingness to abandon what made it successful and start fresh."
In societies that have more memories than dreams, too many people are spending too many days looking backward. They see dignity, affirmation, and self-worth not by mining the present but by chewing on the past. And even that is usually not a real past but an imagined and adorned past. Indeed, such societies focus all their imagination on making that imagined past even more beautiful than it ever was, and then they cling to it…, rather than imagining a better future and acting on that. ~ Thomas L. Friedman