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

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.

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

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.

Washington is a very easy city for you to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

I listen to these comparisons with Cristiano Ronaldo, I’ll be happy and then forget it in five seconds.

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 only see clearly what I remember.

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.

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

If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song.

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

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

The harvest of old age is the recollection and abundance of blessing previously secured.

Nobody is forgotten when it is convenient to remember him.

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

Geologists have a saying – rocks remember.

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.

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

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.

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

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

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.‘

But men are men; the best sometimes forget.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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