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

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

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

Young men soon give, and soon forget, affronts; old age is slow in both.

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

I only see clearly what I remember.

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

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

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

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 really thought I was on the way out. My husband Blake saved my life. Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns. And then I am engulfed in shame.

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.

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

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

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

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

I never know what day it is. Never, ever, ever.

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

But men are men; the best sometimes forget.

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

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

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.

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.

Voters quickly forget what a man says.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

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

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

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.‘

I’ve got a terrible memory; it’s probably because I’m always concentrating on what I’m doing now.

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

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 make such big efforts to forget things and I can’t tell the story of my life because, thank God, I’m still living it.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

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

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

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.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

I have an excellent memory, a most excellent memory.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.

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

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

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

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

The memory of that scene for me is like a frame of film forever frozen at that moment: the red carpet, the green lawn, the white house, the leaden sky. The new president and his first lady.

To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.

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

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

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

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.‘