The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

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.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

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.

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

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.‘

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

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.

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

Kindnesses are easily forgotten; but injuries! what worthy man does not keep those in mind?

I have the world’s largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world… perhaps you’ve seen it.

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

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

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.

I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

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.

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.

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 memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

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

High-quality early-childhood programs and health coverage have expanded, and the number of mentoring relationships for at-risk youth has risen dramatically. That progress is encouraging, but it’s not evenly distributed.

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.

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

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.

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.

I have an excellent memory, a most excellent memory.

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.

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

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 only see clearly what I remember.

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.

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

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.

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

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

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

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 grandfather once ventured upon publishing a volume of hymns. I never heard anyone speak in their favour or argue that they ought to have been sung in the congregation. In that volume, he promised a second if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he did not inflict another.

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

Nothing scares me more than people with some doll collection.

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

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