Mark Twain Quotes

Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.

All of that is constantly operating when you not only learn, but when you recall. But as you recall in a different light, the weights with which something is more probably going to be or not recalled on the next instance, are going to be changed. So you're constantly changing the way, for instance, synapses are going to fire very easily or not so easily.

Memory narrativises itself.

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.

Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths.

My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

The more intelligible a thing is, the more easily it is retained in the memory, and counterwise, the less intelligible it is, the more easily we forget it.

Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

Memory. My poison, my food.

The most important, the longest lasting, the strongest emotional, and the most practiced memories are the ones that are embedded the deepest in the brain, and because we have retrieved them so many times previously, they are the most able to be retrieved. We all hear about people who can remember their youth, their phone number, or street address from 70 years ago, but they cannot recall what they had for breakfast. The memory of this morning's breakfast wasn't rehearsed, and wasn't very important, so it fades away quickly.

For as long as I can remember, I've had memories.

My mother used to say, "Tell your brain you want that piece of information or you want to solve this problem, and then just walk away from it. Just forget about it. Just do something else, completely distract yourself, and you'll see, it's like a computer. Eventually, it will deliver it up." And I find that's really true.

In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

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.

believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade.

[Memory] visits when it is hungry, not when you are.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.