I have an excellent memory, a most excellent memory.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

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

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.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Since everything is in our heads, we had better not lose them.

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?

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.

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

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.‘

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

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

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

I only see clearly what I remember.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

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.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

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.

I’m proud to be an actor. See, as an actor, you live longer. Football players, the brain and all that stuff, ooh-eee, that’s not good.

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

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

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

Our brains are either our greatest assets or our greatest liabilities.

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 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.

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

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

Voters quickly forget what a man says.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Geologists have a saying – rocks remember.

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.

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.