John Irving Quotes

Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.

I'm surprised by how much I remember.

All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.

Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved.

To live (as I understand it) is to exist within a conception of time. But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time. Every memory, no matter how remote its subject, takes place 'Now,' at the moment it's called to the mind. The more something is recalled, the more the brain has a chance to refine the original experience. Because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.

We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known.

I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.

I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in travelling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me how all things were when it was reared.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

Recalling, for me, is a great way of living, so not to forget.

I have a very vivid memory.

What does it remember like?

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

I never forget, remember that. Not an action, not a name, not a face.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

Everyone has ways of trying to find a way to memorise our past. There's something very poetic about that.

God has given each one of us a gift greater than a thousand I.B.M. machines. It is called a memory, and everything that passes through our five senses is stored in this faculty.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

Nothing recalls the past like music.

In memory, you can access something from the past, anything that you've experienced that you remember - it's there. Now, you might have a memento of it in a photograph or in a film or a building or some clothes that you wore. There might be something that connects you to this memory. But all of us are just all caught in this time, whatever that is.