Memories Quotes - Page 222

Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival.

I have the sense that if I push too hard or too far into memory I’ll come apart.

Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. ... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.

I say with pride that I've done over a hundred voices or something, and some of them may have only had two or three lines, but I literally never ran out. I think I'm a bit of a savant that way. I kind of remember every voice I hear, famous or otherwise, and can imitate it pretty fast. I've enjoyed mimicking people famous and not famous all through my life, and they kind of remain in the memory banks, so I'm ready to trot them out.

My childhood memories seem to be wreathed in the twin and far from harmonious olfactory sensations of patchouli oil and caustic soda.

A mere chronicle of observed events will produce only journalism; combined with a sensitive memory, it can produce art.

Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.

Memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand--evil have I done, and with sorrow have I made acquaintance from age to age, and from age to age evil shall I do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes.

The food that memory gives to eat is bitter to the taste, and it is only with the teeth of hope that we can bear to bite it.

Our memories, they can be inviting. But some are altogether, mighty frightening.

Memory isn't the facts, it's just a record you keep to yourself. With the facts, memory is useless.

Because with time blocking out the bad, memory is always bound to be a bit naive and stupidly optimistic.

You will find a spring by the dwelling of the dead, to the left. Next to it stands a white cypress. Do not approach that spring, do not go near it. You will find another spring that pours from the lake of Memory, cool water gushes out of it. There are guards in front of it. Address these words to them: I am daughter of the earth and the star-covered Sky, and I descend from the Sky; and that you know; I burn and die of thirst; let me drink quickly of the cool water that gushes from the lake of Memory. And they will allow you to drink from the sacred spring.

She remembered the heroines of novels she had read, and the lyrical legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. Now she saw herself as one of those amoureuses whom she had so envied: she was becoming, in reality, one of that gallery of fictional figures; the long dream of her youth was coming true.

Remembering the ball became for Emma a daily occupation. Every time Wednesday came round, she told herself when she woke up: 'Ah! One week ago...two weeks ago...three weeks ago, I was there!' And, little by little, in her memory, the faces all blurred together; she forgot the tunes of the quadrilles; no longer could she so clearly picture the liveries and the rooms; some details disappeared, but the yearning remained.

Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.

I've never lived outside of Canada, so I've been really cold my entire life. Most of my memories are coloured by the fact that I was really cold, just... all the time!

We’ve all heard of Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In contrast, I realized, happiness has four stages. To eke out the most happiness from an experience we must: anticipate it, savor it as it unfolds, express happiness, and recall a happy memory.

The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.

Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~Candle

What had survived - maybe all that had survived of Trism - was Liir's sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smell of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression - unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Liir's heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism's glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing.

The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and prisms reflected all possible futures. Books are lighthouses erected on the dark sea of time.

Again there are so many records which contain fond memories and music and songs of which I have to say I am quite proud. There are a couple of tracks which in retrospect on which I now wish I had pushed the red button, however I'm sure this is true of any artist career that has spanned the number of years that mine has. I do not believe however that I have ever made a bad record and I have certainly never made a record to which I didn't give my complete commitment.

Memory is often - perhaps usually - a distorting lens: what we think we remember isn't the way it was at all. It's what we'd like to remember.

My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort.