There is no memory or retentive faculty based on lasting impression. What we designate as memory is but increased responsiveness to repeated stimuli.

I have an excellent memory, a most excellent 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.‘

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

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.

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.

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.

No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.

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

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.‘

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

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 had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker – yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

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

I only see clearly what I remember.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips.

My recollection is – and I’d have to confirm this – but I don’t recall paying any money to go to law school.

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

My mind doesn’t work, my memories don’t work like a computer file where I can just retrieve them and, boy, there it is. My mind is selective in terms of memories. When I try to think back to college or high school, there are gaps. I try to fill them in. But I can’t tell you it’s always the truth.

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.

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

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

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.

If I like a thing, it just sticks after once reading it or hearing it.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

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.

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

Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

Kindnesses are easily forgotten; but injuries! what worthy man does not keep those in mind?

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.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word ‚stimulus,‘ my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people’s memories for a while.

Geologists have a saying – rocks remember.

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

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.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‚Where did we come from, what happens next?‘ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

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

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

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.

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

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

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

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

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

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

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

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.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

If it’s hard to remember, it’ll be difficult to forget.

Yesterday’s just a memory, tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be.

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.

Voters quickly forget what a man says.

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.

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.