Unreliable Memory Quotes

He past is only an unreliable memory held in the present. The future is only a projection of our present conceptions. The present itself vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it. So why bother with attempting to establish an illusion of solid ground?.. ~ Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

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

For life has worn me down: continual uneasiness, concealment of my knowledge, pretense, fear, a painful straining of all my nerves - not to let down, not to ring out ... and even to this day I still feel an ache in that part of my memory where the very beginning of this effort is recorded, that is, the occasion when I first understood that things which to me had seemed natural were actually forbidden, impossible, that any thought of them was criminal. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

After everything is said and done, a memory remains a treacherous thing…How long does one cling on to the people they've lost? How long could I have remembered my grandfather? How long had it been since I forgotten him and my mind began harbouring other things? ~ Kanza Javed

If your friend has displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage, and has doubled his power to serve you, and, ere you can rise up again, will burden you with blessings. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain's inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them. Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love. ~ Thomas Lewis

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness? ~ Julian Barnes

Every memory makes me who I am right now, in this moment. Good or bad, all experiences shape you. ~ L. H. Cosway

Yes it is, because you can only be brave if you're scared. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

It was, of course, the memory of Sophie and Nathan's long-ago plunge that set loose this flood [of tears], but it was also a letting go of rage and sorrow for the many others who during these past months had battered at my mind and now demanded my mourning: Sophie and Nathan, yes, but also Jan and Eva -- Eva with her one-eyed mis -- and Eddie Farrell, and Bobby Weed, and my young black savior Artiste, and Maria Hunt, and Nat Turner, and Wanda Muck-Horch von Kretschmann, who were but a few of the beaten and butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the earth. I did not weep for the six million Jews or the two million Poles or the one million Serbs or the five million Russians -- I was unprepared to weep for all humanity -- but I did weep for these others who in one way or another had become dear to me, and my sobs made an unashamed racket across the abandoned beach; then I had no more tears to shed, I lowered myself to the sand...and slept...When I awoke it was nearly morning...I heard children chattering nearby. I stirred...Blessing my resurrection, I realized that the children had covered me with sand, protectively, and that I lay as safe as a mummy beneath this fine, enveloping overcoat. ~ William Styron

Misfortune comes to people who live only on the memory of their past grandeur. ~ Louise Colet

A pause. Then she said: "Tell me, Noah, what do you remember most from the summer we spent together?"

"All of it."

"Anything in particular?"

"No," he said.

"You don't remember?"

He answered quietly. "No, it's not that. It's not what you're thinking. I was serious when I said 'all of it.' I can remember every moment we were together, and in each or them there was something wonderful. I can't pick any one time that meant more than any other.

The entire summer was perfect, the kind of summer everyone should have. How could I pick one moment over another?

"Poets often describe love as an emotion that we can't control, one that overwhelms logic and common sense. That's what it was like for me. I didn't plan on falling in love with you, and I doubt if you planned on falling in love with me. But once we met, it was clear that neither of use could control what was happening to us. We fell in love, despite our differences, and once we did, something rare and beautiful was created. For me, love like that has happened only once, and that's why every minute we spent together has been seared in my memory.

I'll never forget a single moment of it."

Allie stare at him. No one had ever said anything lik that to her before. Ever. She didn't know what to say and stayed silent, her face hot. ~ Nicholas Sparks

The principle of painting is also to make a choice. "Even genius," writes Delacroix, ruminating on his art,
"is only the gift of generalizing and choosing." The painter isolates his subject, which is the first way of
unifying it. Landscapes flee, vanish from the memory, or destroy one another. That is why the landscape
painter or the painter of still life isolates in space and time things that normally change with the light, get
lost in an infinite perspective, or disappear under the impact of other values. The first thing that a
landscape painter does is to square off his canvas. He eliminates as much as he includes. ~ Albert Camus

In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure ... ~ Madeleine L'Engle

It seems that whether we are aware of it or not, memory carries a dagger in its breast. ~ Kyung-Sook Shin

Memory results from a process of continual re-categorization which, by its nature, must be procedural and involve continual motor activity and repeated rehearsal. ~ Gerald Edelman

Memory entering the head like a knife.
A girl's hands slicing the heart in two. ~ Alfian Sa'at

How many years have passed since that far-off June afternoon? More than thirty. And yet, if I close my eyes, Micòl Finzi-Contini is still there, leaning over her garden wall, looking at me and talking to me. In 1929 Micòl was little more than a child, a thin, blond thirteen-year old with large, clear, magnetic eyes. And I was a boy in short trousers, very bourgeois and very vain, whom a small academic setback was sufficient to cast down into the most childish desperation. We both fixed our eyes on each other. Above her head the sky was a compact blue, a warm already summer sky without the slightest cloud. Nothing, it seemed, would be able to alter it, and nothing indeed has altered it, at least in memory. ~ Giorgio Bassani

Thanks to photography, some memories overstay their welcome. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized. ~ Isabel Allende

You bring fresh eyes, Matt. For us, something crazy may happen, and we all say 'Oh my' at the time, but the next week some new crazy thing happens that wipes the memory clean. And we go on to the next. La-di-da. I guess we just forgot about that other incident until now.
- spoken by Sara, the missionary doctor, to Matt.
(from The Sacrament of the Goddess, 2014) ~ Joe Niemczura

He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves. ~ Hilary Mantel

Memory deforms reality, which nevertheless is formed as reality only in memory ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

As a child, I remember my dad would sometimes drive me into town with him to play pinball machines together. It's a bittersweet memory but also a favorite. ~ Iggy Azalea

Our reading can affect our imaginations in ways of which we are not consciously aware. It is quite common ... to re-read something after a gap of many years and realize that it has been there all along, without any memory of where it was first encountered. But it may have been working away all the time. ~ Tom Shippey

Maybe she's not looking at me, but beyond me. In the depths of our crater lake, all is silent. The volcano's been extinct for ages. Layer upon layer of solitude, like folds of soft mud. The little bit of light that manages to penetrate to the depths lights up the surroundings like the remnants of some faint, distant memory. ~ Haruki Murakami

He had eaten his share of the dinner, but he hadn't really enjoyed it because he was thinking all the time about Turkish Delight - and there's nothing that spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of bad magic food. ~ C.S. Lewis

It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world - sights, sounds, smells - into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past. ~ Noah Hawley

I had this image stuck in my mind. I was four and I was walking down the street, holding my brother's hand. I wondered if it was a memory or a dream. Or a hope. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

Memory was my drug of choice. -Pea Hicks ~ Larry Smith

Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship. ~ Gertrude Stein

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it. ~ Tom Stoppard

Trying to compose even a single sentence can have the same effect, as we try to juggle grammatical and syntactical alternatives plus all the possibilities of tone, nuance, and rhythm even a simple sentence offers. Composing, then, is a cognitive activity that
constantly threatens to overload short-term memory. ~ Linda Flower

: Their acts violated our trust. : The secrecy told us we were alone. : The shame swirling through our experience convinced us we didn't deserve the best for ourselves. : Our circumstances twisted our beliefs about what to expect out of life. : Surviving our unpredictable, disempowering childhood left little opportunity to explore our talents or creativity. It's been said, living through childhood sexual abuse is like living in a war zone. Each of us survived by doing the best we could. Now we have the opportunity to celebrate the child we were and all we did to reach this place in life when healing is possible. Now we get to update our information. And this will bring encouraging, empowering, joy-filled changes into our lives. Each time you go back into a memory, you have the opportunity to 'see' what you learned in that moment of trauma. When I was six-years old, playing with my doll with abandon that blocked out all other noise, I found ~ Jeanne McElvaney

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. ~ Walter Benjamin

Once upon a time there were two boys who purposefully misremembered things about their father. It made them feel better if ever they forgot things about their mother. ~ Max Porter

This wasn't - I wasn't." He was burning red with embarrassment, trying to get his pants up and grab his memory stick and hide the fact he'd been about to jerk off."

"What were you doing? Are you - to my porn?" Josh looked a bit dazed.

"I was submitting my paper. And I - "

"You tripped and fell into my porn folder? ~ Lana McGregor