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

Geologists have a saying – rocks remember.

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.

I don’t care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don’t have an intuitive feeling for equations.

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.

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

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

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

Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.

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.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

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

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

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.‘

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Confidence is always a good thing to have going into the weekend. Especially where it’s quite difficult to put the lap together.

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

The complexity of things – the things within things – just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

Voters quickly forget what a man says.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn’t exist without the performance-art element.

My name can’t be that tough to pronounce!

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.

I go to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon Washington. Unless the great God, who assisted him, shall be with me and aid me, I must fail; but if the same omniscient mind and almighty arm that directed and protected him shall guide and support me, I shall not fail – I shall succeed.

I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well.

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

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

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

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

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.‘

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