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

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

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

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

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.

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

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

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

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

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

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

I have an excellent memory, a most excellent memory.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 only see clearly what I remember.

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.

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.

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.

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

Nobody is forgotten when it is convenient to remember him.

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.

I retain what’s interesting to me, but I don’t have a lot of strategic depth.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

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.

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

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

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.‘

Voters quickly forget what a man says.

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

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

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

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Geologists have a saying – rocks remember.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.