Memory Impact Quotes

Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.

The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.

History does influence our lives - every moment. We never sort of live our lives in a linear fashion. We always have these memories and these images from our past that sometimes we're not even aware of, and they sort of shape who we are.

But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.

I've learned that memories can have a physical, almost living presence.

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.

Memories are not just about the past. They determine our future.

When we live with a memory we live with a corpse; the impact of the experience has changed us once but can never change us again.

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?

Sixty per cent of how you act is drawn from memories. And it's about who you are. I am a son, brother, husband, father, and caretaker. You connect with certain instances and emotions.

One of the leading theories of why electroconvulsive therapy is effective for most severe depressions is that it causes a loss of short-term memory - patients feel better because they can't remember why they were sad.

I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don't want to be the person to stick that in your brain.

The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present.

In your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to reenter it.

The sense of one's past is so strong and forms our sense of self so strongly, it will always fascinate, elude and confuse me.

When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view.

How is the mind which functions on knowledge how is the brain which is recording all the time to end, to see the importance of recording and not let it move in any other direction? Very simply: you insult me, you hurt me, by word, gesture, by an actual act; that leaves a mark on the brain which is memory. That memory is knowledge, that knowledge is going to interfere in my meeting you next time obviously.

Some studies make such a deep impression on you that they stay etched in your memory forever.

As you try to tweak your sleep one way or the other, you might be, you might be doing great - you might do better at remembering details of an event, but you might end up being poorer at abstracting the gist or the rules associated with it.

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

You carry your past with you even if you don't remember any of it.

The reason why we want to remember an image varies: because we simply 'love it,' or dislike it so intensely that it becomes compulsive, or because it has made us realize something about ourselves, or has brought about some slight change in us. Perhaps the reader can recall some image, after the seeing of which he has never been quite the same.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.

Memories shared serve each one differently.

He was an Afghan Hound name Kabul. Since him I have had other Afghan Hounds.... Perhaps I am looking for his ghost. He is the only one that I sometimes think about. Often, if he comes in to my mind when I am working, it alters what I do. The nose on the face I am drawing gets longer and sharper. The hair of the woman I am sketching gets longer and fluffy, resting against her cheeks like his ears rested against his head.