Sense Memory Quotes

Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense. ~ James Sallis

An old girlfriend is a gun in your belly. It's no longer loaded, so when you see her, all you feel is the hollow mechanical click in your gut, and possibly the ghost of an echo, sense memory from when it used to carry live rounds. Occasionally, though, there's a bullet you missed, lying dormant in its overlooked chamber, and when that trigger gets pulled, the unexpected gunshot is deafening even as the forgotten bullet rips its way through the tissue and muscle of your midsection and out into the light of day. Seeing Carly is like that. Even though we haven't spoken in almost ten years, it's an explosion, and in that one instant every memory, every feeling, comes flooding back as fresh as if it were yesterday. ~ Jonathan Tropper

[Memory] ... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense ... Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world. ~ John Daniel

Simon!"
The voice was Clary's. He would know it anywhere. He wondered if his mind was conjuring it up now, a sense memory of what he'd most loved during life to carry him through the process of death.
"Simon, you stupid idiot! I'm over here! At the window!"
Simon jumped to his feet. He doubted his mind would conjure that up. ~ Cassandra Clare

You don't really have to do the things that your character is doing. But us actors, we use something called sense memory. I've certainly been drunk before, and part of my job is to recall that without getting drunk. ~ Jeff Bridges

he had an idea - too sentimental to speak aloud and he knew none of his divorced friends would ever own up to it - that something must linger, a half-life of marriage, some sense memory of love even if obviously not the thing itself. He thought these people must mean something to one another, even if they didn't like one another anymore. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

In the months to come, I would look back on this time in my life almost as a kind of out-of-body travel, from which I had returned with nothing but a sense memory of having been somewhere inexpressibly exciting and far away. It wasn't like a dream, exactly, although it had a dream's strange internal logic. It was like looking through the window of an airplane at night, the way the city below appears so near, yet untouchable beyond the glass--a network of lights, flames, stars. ~ Katha Pollitt

It was very pleasant to savor its aroma, for smells have the power to evoke the past, bringing back sounds and even other smells that have no match in the present. -Tita ~ Laura Esquivel

There is a purpose to our lives, even if it is sometimes hidden from us, and even if the biggest turning points and heartbreaks only make sense as we look back, rather than as we are experiencing them. So we might as well live life as if - as the poet Rumi put it - everything is rigged in our favor. ~ Arianna Huffington

This is a haiku
Haiku's don't have to make sense
Refrigerator ~ Anonymous

Why do so many young people literally die to belong to fraternities, sororities, and other college social organizations? The answer is complicated, but here is a starting point:
Ever since the medieval universities were founded, young people have done whatever it takes to gain acceptance, to break with their past lives, to achieve a sense of power, to carve out a society of their own that isn't quite what their tutors and teachers had in mind. In the United States, hazing and drinking have been endemic since colonial days. ~ Hank Nuwer

There are those of us who learn to live completely in the moment. For such people the Past vanishes and the future loses meaning. There is only the Present, which means that two of the three Aalim are surplus to requirements. And then there are those of us who are trapped in yesterdays, in the memory of a lost love, or a childhood home, or a dreadful crime. And some people live only for a better tomorrow; for them the past ceases to exist ~ Salman Rushdie

Most of the time we settle for half and i like it better, even as i know how wrong he was and his death useless, i tremble for i confess that something peversley pure calls to me from his memory ~ Arthur Miller

Why do we speak of memory and speed reading? Why is there this need to learn how to learn? The reason is simple. Because at none of us, at school, taught us to learn quickly; they have given us only the contents, making us understand that the content is everything, but they don't have told how to study them. They haven't ever taught to speak in public, but in the school days it happened to do this, just think of the classic query where the audience had as a teacher and class of 20-30 students. ~ Robert James

If a man didn't make sense, the Scotch felt it was misplaced politeness to try to keep him from knowing it. Better that he be aware of his reputation, for this would encourage reticence which goes well with stupidity. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part -a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game -it was corpse fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience down through the centuries. Some morals tended to keep people slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State. Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave alone. ~ Charles Bukowski

Each time you set and reach a goal, you'll discover a sense of contentment that breeds a stronger sense of direction and joy. ~ Emilie Barnes

In teaching, regard must be had to the faculties possessed by the pupil. In childhood, memory; in youth, the understanding; in mature life, the reason is the predominating faculty. ~ Joseph P. Bradley

A particular rule that seems to make sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and applied to all cases. It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows. ~ James Q. Wilson

A time will come when the science of destruction shall bend before the arts of peace; when the genius which multiplies our powers, which creates new products, which diffuses comfort and happiness among the great mass of the people, shall occupy in the general estimation of mankind that rank which reason and common sense now assign to it. ~ Francois Arago

But there's no doubt that children have an innate sense of humor. No matter how young they are, they always know when something's really funny. ~ Tetsuko Kuroyanagi

He hadn't even met me and he didn't like me. I felt a sense of accomplishment. ~ Marshall Thornton

JEM: Is there a particular reason you keep biting vampires?
WILL: They don't expect it.
JEM: Of course they don't. They know what happens when one of us consumes vampire blood. They probably expect you to have more sense.
WILL: That expectation never seems to serve them very well, does it?
JEM: It hardly serves you, either. ~ Cassandra Clare

[W]e might do better here to think of culture as fashion. And in fashion, of course, the key is not wearing a particular outfit but being able to wear it ... Clothing is a mere collection of garments; fashionability is a performative capacity, an ability to effect the right look through an effective combination of garments, social sense, and bodily performance. ~ James Ferguson

Summer Hawthorne was simply more trouble than she was worth. At least as far as anyone with any sense would realize.
Unfortunately, Taka's common sense seemed to have deserted him in the last few days. ~ Anne Stuart

Overtaken by demographic transformation and two generations of socio-geographic mobility, France's once-seamless history seemed set to disappear from national memory altogether.

The anxiety of loss had two effects. One was an increase in the range of the official patrimoine, the publicly espoused body of monuments and artifacts stamped 'heritage' by the authority of the state. In 1988, at the behest of Mitterrand's Culture Minister Jack Lang, the list of officially protected items in the patrimoine culturel of "France - previously restricted to UNESCO-style heirlooms such as the Pont du Gard near Nîmes, or Philip the Bold's ramparts at Aigues-Mortes - was dramatically enlarged.

It is revealing of the approach taken by Lang and his successors that among France's new 'heritage sites' was the crumbling façade of the Hôtel du Nord on Paris's Quai de Jemappes: an avowedly nostalgic homage to Marcel Carné's 1938 film classic of that name. But Carné shot that movie entirely in a studio. So the preservation of a building (or the façade of a building) which never even appeared in the film could be seen - according to taste - either as a subtle French exercise in post-modern irony, or else as symptomatic of the unavoidably bogus nature of any memory when subjected thus to official taxidermy. ~ Tony Judt

At this point in my life, I find myself obsessed with alternate paths I could've taken. I don't think about this with a sense of regret, but with a sense of wonder ... ~ Ben Gibbard

The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of all the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which
her beauty was a part. ~ Edith Wharton

Women don't have a sense of humor. They don't need one. The Almighty made them as a permanent joke on men. From which one may logically deduce tha the Almighty is a female. ~ Loretta Chase

There's no way for me to know she'll find me here. I didn't call. I didn't text. I left it up to old connection, that old friendship sense. ~ Rachel Cohn

How much liberty do with want to give up for a false sense of security? ~ Rand Paul

Charting is a little like surfing. You dont have to know a lot about the physics of tides, resonance, and fluid dynamics in order to catch a good wave. You just have to be able to sense when its happening and then have the drive to act at the right time. ~ Ed Seykota

I am learning my way toward something that will make sense of my life, and I learn by going where I have to go, with whatever companions I am graced. ~ Dean Koontz

Now a Dark Age seemed to be passing. For twelve centuries, a small flame of knowledge had been kept smoldering in the monasteries; only now were there minds ready to be kindled. Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible - that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God's and not Man's, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

There is seldom any rational reason for having regreats about past deeds or events. Because the past does not exist in any other way than in your memory.

When you recognise this lack of reality, you can be calm. ~ Paul Wilson

I love the silhouettes of the '50s that were feminine and womanly without being too revealing. I've always gravitated towards that kind of sense of style and fashion. ~ Emmy Rossum

Shareholders," murmured Eddie, the word echoing meaninglessly in his head. His brain had screeched to a halt in front of an earlier word in the sentence, and it now stood (in a figurative sense) stock still, with its eyes wide and its jaw open, staring at the word in awe. Lovely Wanda Kwan, the vaguely Asian-American publishing company representative, had uttered, through her lip gloss and perfect teeth, the one word that every writer secretly yearns to hear. That word is movie. "Ms. Kwan," he began. ~ Robert Kroese

Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with. ~ Umberto Eco