Jessamyn West Quotes

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.

People sometimes forget when you remember, but they always remember when you forget.

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

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.

Memory - the very skin of life.

Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.

I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

I was helped by having a verbatim memory of what happened years ago, even if I can't remember what happened a couple of days ago.

While the hippocampus itself doesn't store memories, it serves to triage our experiences based upon their survival significance.

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

A story is ultimately a memory. It's important when you're telling a story to think about why this memory is a memory. You don't remember everything in life; you just remember certain things - so, why this one?

Why is it that I can remember so easily the lyrics to the opening theme song of 'Gilligan's Island?' Why do I remember these trivial things, and I can't remember the names of important collaborators?

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.