I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.

I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I’d invented it, because it is very true.

Man is the only animal capable of reasoning, though many others possess the faculty of memory and instruction in common with him.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn’t going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I’ve ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn’t want to do whatever he did.

I practiced drawing all the time and became very interested in it. If I was at a meeting that wasn’t getting anywhere – like the one where Carl Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a psychology department – I would draw the other people.

If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God.

People see things differently and remember things differently. It’s why if somebody robs a liquor store and there are four witnesses they’ll often disagree.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

A political event was that I met Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary. He is a young, intelligent guy, very sure of himself and extraordinarily audacious; I think we hit it off well.

I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.

I never heard of an old man forgetting where he had buried his money! Old people remember what interests them: the dates fixed for their lawsuits, and the names of their debtors and creditors.

I have a memory, and I can just eliminate mistakes when they come up because I’ve already made them.

I remember very little about writing the first series of ‚Hitchhiker’s.‘ It’s almost as if someone else wrote it.

John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he’s regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

The fact is, when men carry the same ideals in their hearts, nothing can isolate them – neither prison walls nor the sod of cemeteries. For a single memory, a single spirit, a single idea, a single conscience, a single dignity will sustain them all.

I remember when the candle shop burned down. Everyone stood around singing ‚Happy Birthday.‘

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn’t going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I’ve ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn’t want to do whatever he did. So after that, I switched to Communications.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories – not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father’s generation. It’s a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time… I think I’ve forgotten this before.

I didn’t want to become a professor or get tenure or teach or anything. All I wanted to do was get a degree because Louis Leakey said I needed one, which was right, and once I succeeded I could get back to the field.

I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.

But being on location and shooting, whether its in Puerto Rico or Atlanta, it always reminds me of how really cool my job can be. Interacting with the fans is one of the best parts of it.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation, and they got infected with malaria, and partly ‚cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.

Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!

There are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.

When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

My first assistant-coaching job in football was at William & Mary in 1961. The pay wasn’t much, so to get $300 more per year, I agreed to coach the golf team. I didn’t even know how to keep score, and really, my main job was not to wreck the van on the way to tournaments.

I only see clearly what I remember.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

My first assistant-coaching job in football was at William & Mary in 1961.

I get a thrill meeting kids who are into alternative music.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Seeing Pax get extra-nervous about which shirt he is going to wear when he meets Aung San Suu Kyi, I get very moved. He rightfully doesn’t get nervous going to a movie premiere; he gets nervous going to meet her.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut – he’s my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was a great thrill for me. I don’t really remember what we talked about.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

Meeting President Obama was amazing. Very inspiring.