James A. Garfield Quotes

Observation is an old man's memory.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

I came in 11 years ago. I remember it like it was tomorrow

Memory is imagination pinned down.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

It's like your children talking about holidays, you find they have a quite different memory of it from you. Perhaps everything is not how it is, but how it's remembered.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

After the age of 80, everything reminds you of something else.

The matter does not appear to me now as it has appears to have appeared to me then.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.

You can certainly get an idea of the value of memory if your memories can carry you out into the world no matter how utterly dissatisfied you may be with the present and wish you could get away from it.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

Memory is a strange Bell—Jubilee, and Knell.

Only when your memories are more important to you than your goals are you old.

Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!

An old doting fool, with one foot already in the grave.

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.

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