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

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

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.

I have an excellent memory, a most excellent memory.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

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.

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.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

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.

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

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

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

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