Memory

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

I have all of the Apple products. Everything I've ever written, I've written on a Mac. My first computer, my roommates and I chipped in, and we got that first Macintosh - 128K. It had as much memory as a greeting card that plays music.

The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the angels of our nature.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

I have an old brain but a terrific memory.

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

Every man's memory is his private literature.

I was asked to memorise what I did not understand, and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.

Memory narrativises itself.

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

Memory is the thing you forget with.

A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.

I took Meisner for a long time. I use a lot of sense memory and, well, I wouldn't say Method, but I can't really avoid getting into character.

I'm a big believer in sort of sense memory, like using something that you've experienced in order to put yourself in the position that the character is in.

Food is so heavily connected to memory.

Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?

A strong emotion, especially if experienced for the first time, leaves a vivid memory of the scene where it occurred.

I'm more verbal and not as private as I was as a kid. I still do a form of sense memory. It honestly depends on the job. It depends on the other people you're working with, how the other actor works.

Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.

Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories, memories told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I've always been interested in that.

Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety, and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.

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.

Not only the Archivist alone but all who work for NARA are designated custodians of America's national memory.

Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.

We can invent only with memory.

My earliest childhood memory is watching the sunlight through a jar of amber full of wasps.

I temporarily became a surgeon for 'Memory of Love'. I spent two weeks in an operating theatre, watching amputations, and I loved it.

I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

I read academic books on courtesan culture at the turn-of-the century in Shanghai such as Gail Hershatter's 'The Gender of Memory'. The diaries were mostly in the form of letters from courtesans to a lover who had disappeared or taken their savings.

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.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

A writer's main tool is his memory - his own memory, the collective memory of his people. And the strongest memory is the one that is created by a wound to the heart.

I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory.

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

And it sort of jogged a memory of something that I read at school and I read it, and I thought God this is it. So you never can tell. I could find something this afternoon.

I was running an assembly line designed to build memory chips. I saw the microprocessor as a bloody nuisance.

I think it's foolish to think that if you've done something for so long, you can kind of delete it out of your memory bank or delete every emotion attached to it. I knew when I retired what that meant.

Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.

Memory is more indelible than ink.

I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed... here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars.

As the heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory, perception, judgment, emotion, and will, differ from the brain which is the instrument of thought.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.

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

What the immune system of man has in its advanced development is what we call immunological memory, so that once it sees something for the first time, when it sees it the second or the third time, it can respond against it in a way that's much more accelerated than when it sees it for the first time.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.

Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.

Life may unfold chronologically for the body and for bureaucracies that keep track of such things as births, marriages, deaths, visas, tax returns, expulsions, and identity cards, but memory does not play this game in quite the same way, always manages to confound the desire for tidiness.

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

I can bulk up very fast. I can lift heavy weights because, like most people, I started off with heavy workouts. That's stayed in my muscle memory. I feel horrible when I feel my jeans are getting tight. Workouts peace me out.

You get a letter from her agency embracing you into the family that says, 'It is our goal now to help you achieve your dream of being a songwriter, in John's memory.'

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

After you've read a novel, you only retain a vague memory of its contents. You remember the atmosphere, the odd image or phrase or vivid cameo.

We were interested in this notion of compression- a lot of the songs were really short so that you'd absorb them in memory rather than when you're actually hearing them.

I'm horrible at quoting movies! Even my very favorites are not easily recalled or programmed to memory. When people start movie quoting around me, I'm that person who just smiles and then looks up the reference later.

The worst thing ever for me is go see a movie, and the next day I go, 'What did I do last night? I have no memory of this $300 million movie I watched because I felt nothing.'

I do think a key to success in any walk of life is having a short memory and a thick skin - I know it has served me well over the years.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

One thing I always make - and I'm sure this is partly to do with memory and yearning and because I've made it ever since my children were born - I make gingerbread every year. And it's partly just the perfume of the spices in the house, makes it smell like winter to me.

My most powerful memory was hearing Earl Scruggs on 'The Beverly Hillbillies' as a 5 or 6 year old. That sound just blew me away, shook my head up.

When my father was assassinated, I decided that I would not compete with his memory, but the priority would be to achieve his dream.

Studying music involves a lot of mathematics and a lot of exercises of memory. Or you've got to be able to be like somebody, to play like somebody, to play Mozart's music the way he played it and how he intended it. You've got to make it perfect, and that's not what I want to do. Although it is beautiful.

I meet with retired football players. Some are well-dressed, some are well-spoken, but when you talk to them personally, they will admit to you that they are having problems. But they are managing their problems. They have impaired memory, they're having mood problems. They are being treated by their psychiatrists.

Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there's always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills.

You know, as you get older, the first thing you lose is memory. It seems to be happening with me.

I think. as a child, there's something frightening about certain adults, particularly when you're in their clutches or power. That must be the reason why Roald Dahl creates such brilliant characters: He taps into something in the collective memory of people.

I have a two-story house and a bad memory, so I'm up and down those stairs all the time. That's my exercise.

I'm one of those who cut off seeing people after a certain time, when the weight is gone and they sound like the dementia is very advanced - I don't want to see that. I don't even go in to look at the body. That's not my last memory.

I have an excellent memory, a most excellent memory.

I think it killed the performance on a lot of the systems in the Labs for years because everyone had their own copy of it, but it wasn't being shared, and so they wasted huge amounts of memory back when memory was expensive.

I think when I listen to old records, it puts me back in the atmosphere of what it felt like to make the record and who was there and what the room looked like. It's more a sensory memory.

When you lose a loved one, you come to these crossroads. You can take the path that leads you down the aisle of sadness, or you can say, 'I'm never going to let this person's memory die. I'm going to make sure everything they worked for continues.'

All these years later, I have almost no memory of the shows themselves. It's a blur. I remember my jogging runs better - that was my way of getting my energy together. I used to try to get to the arena as late as possible, otherwise, I'd just be pacing around, waiting to go on.

It is not just software glitches and corrupted memory cards that should be on the minds of election officials. Hackers pose another very real problem whereby an election could be tilted towards a favored candidate.

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

It's been 25 years now, and truthfully, time sometimes blurs the memory.

After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.

When you get old, it's hard to tell what's memory and what you've kind of created in your head as memory, you know?

Very few movies remain in public memory as landmark films, and I want to see whether '3 Idiots' will be up there with some of the wonderful films that have come out of this country... Hopefully, we'll come to know in a few years whether it can become one of the great films.

Alzheimer's is a horrible thing. Some people are naive about it. They think, 'Oh it's just your memory,' but my mother was in terrible pain. Your body closes down. She didn't know if she'd eaten or if she wanted to eat. She couldn't remember how to walk. Towards the end, she didn't know us. It came gradually, then it got worse.

My mother, who died aged 82, had Alzheimer's. Losing your memory is bad enough, but everything shuts down. You can't remember how to eat or go to the toilet. It's a terrible disease and so distressing to watch it take over someone you love.

I used to - my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I've always heard kind of melodies in my head.

I enjoy coming to Scotland, and my favourite memory has to be my first Open at Carnoustie. Coming over from a small town and playing in something so big to golf and y'all.

I'm afraid that the United States is more isolated today than at any other time in my memory.

I'd say my best memory was climbing Mt. Fuji, and the worst memory was... trying to fit my feet into the free giveaway slippers at Japanese schools.

When I was a kid, a pickleball hit me in the back of the head, and I had memory problems. I was in a boarding school and the nuns gave me poems to remember to try and get the memory going again.

My mother was a reporter, and though she quit when they had kids, she still loved it. She told me about the people at the paper and the articles she wrote. She had the best memory of anyone I know, and she could really tell a tale.

Memory is the first casualty of middle age, if I remember correctly.

Three thousand people died at ground zero. Their families are entitled to a little bit of respect, to respect the memory of those poor people that died there. And how about the families of all those soldiers that died in the two ensuing wars? Aren't they entitled to a little bit of respect - the kids, the wives, the parents?

In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there's a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone's asleep, they go erasing the past. It's like a bad Ray Bradbury story - 'The Memory Erasers'.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory.

My fat cells have a memory like Einstein! I'm proof that surgery is not a magic potion. There are many ways to sabotage it.

I've never really been anywhere, and now I get to go everywhere. I just have to make sure there's enough memory on my computer to hold all my pictures.

There was a train that would come by our house every night, and I'd hear the whistle blow. That is the sweetest memory I have.

I should remember more, and I have a pretty good memory.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

I've never been very attached to genre labels and never set out intentionally to write historic fiction. Besides, what you consider historic depends on how far back your memory extends.

I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience, but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up, because you're filling in spaces.

I was trying to figure out what a memory feels like.

Memory in youth is active and easily impressible, in old age it is comparatively callous to new impressions, but still retains vividly those of earlier years.

If there is one phrase or action that every person on the planet would like to erase from his or her memory or have the chance to undo, it would be, 'Let's do it again.'

Memory is a fiction we tell ourselves: just a piece of the truth.

I have an evolving relationship with my father, and his memory, especially the older I get. I know that some of the things that interested him are things that interest me.

We share a huge visual memory bank, mostly through painting and other images in history. I think when a modern photograph taps into those, sometimes very subliminally, it makes people respond.

I guess the idea of doing albums in their entirety, in sequence, appeals to people. I guess it's the memory of being able to hear the music in the way it was originally presented.

The war broke out, and for a number of years I lived in darkness, with the memory of the lakes, the trees and the skies of Sweden, until I returned in 1946 to spend two unforgettable years in the laboratory of Hugo Theorell.

Everyone has their dates. For me, it's 1991. I can place every memory of my life either before or after this date. It's the year I became an adult. My mother died, and I created my company shortly thereafter. I definitely would not have done it if she hadn't passed away.

Yes, my first memory of singing, in general, was of a Christmas song. And then listening to Christmas music was really the first music I was ever connected to.

I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.

I'm just always learning lines. I've learned to flag the really crucial scenes, and I start figuring them out and committing them to memory as soon as I get them.

I cannot give a single concert at which I do not play one piece after the other in an agony of terror because my memory threatens to fail me. This fear torments me for days beforehand.

I hung out in the Baltimore area a lot. My biggest memory was playing football against Morgan. That was, like, 'Forget about it,' that was a really big thing. They used to kick our butts all the time.

This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

By the time I was in sixth grade I could bound every country in the world from memory.

I like very human stories that venture into sci-fi or the supernatural or areas that I think occupy a lot of space in our collective memory for the films that we loved as children.

I have a terrible memory in general, but one thing I've always been able to remember is my songs.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

I have an unusual type of thinking. I have no visual memory whatsoever. Everything is conceptual to me.

Traditional autobiography has generally had a poor press. The novelist Daphne du Maurier condemned all examples of this literary form as self-indulgent. Others have quipped that autobiography reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

The high point of my career was winning the Champions League. No one will ever erase that from my memory, in the same way that no one will ever erase the fact that I did it in a Manchester United shirt.

People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination.

I know how to hit a mark without looking. I instinctively know where my eye line should be. That's all 100%. But your character and the story are always different, so the emotional part is not muscle memory. You're still surprised by stuff and get the adrenaline.

My co-winners, Peter Diamond and Christopher Pissarides, and I wish to thank the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation for this very great honor. We each feel privileged and humbled to be named the winners of the 2010 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

We did not have a television while I was growing up, and so I read voraciously. My earliest memory of being utterly transfixed by a book was Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time.'

Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.

Christmas cookies can't help but be retro - they are memory first, sugar-flour-egg-redhot-gumdrop-sparkle reality second.

Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).

Part of us believes the new car is better because it lasts longer. But, in fact, that's the worst thing about the new car. It will stay around to disappoint you, whereas a trip to Europe is over. It evaporates. It has the good sense to go away, and you are left with nothing but a wonderful memory.

We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

My first memory - at about four - was of numbers. The doctors who study me think a combination of mild autism and seizures I had when I was three have made me experience numbers the way I do.

Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record keepers, forever searching past events for elusive patterns - and forever believing that such patterns are to be found.

Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.

Harlem exists in retrospect, in the memory of grandparents or elderly cousins, those 'old-timers' ever ready with their geysers of remembered scenes. The legends of 'Black Mecca' are preserved in the glossy musicals of Times Square and in texts of virtually every kind.

My first memory of the public library is of lugging home a volume of Norse myths as heavy as a thunder-god's hammer.

Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and other varieties have anthocyanins that can help reverse some loss of balance and memory associated with aging.

Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

I take my personal upkeep real seriously, my sense of organization and attention to detail, my memory, my business - I love the business.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for 'history.' The closest word for it is memory.

Memory enhancement self-help programs abound and promise improved memory performance by the utilization of any number of seemingly unique techniques focused on the context of how information is encoded.

About the only thing that I have - or had, because it's failing me lately - is my memory. I had a really good memory. I was always terribly protective of that fact.

I'll never forget anything about Middle Earth. That's part of my memory now so I won't miss anything.

Karma, memory, and desire are just the software of the soul. It's conditioning that the soul undergoes in order to create experience. And it's a cycle. In most people, the cycle is a conditioned response. They do the same things over and over again.

Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

It's like your children talking about holidays, you find they have a quite different memory of it from you. Perhaps everything is not how it is, but how it's remembered.

I think a lot of us can relate to not choosing to face a painful memory, and something that's a painful past, and wanting to pretend like it never happened.

Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.

The one thing that holds people back from working out together is that they don't want to smell around other people. Your olfactory sense is the primary sense in your memory, and you don't want to be part of anyone's memory thinking that you smell bad.

The industry's memory is quite short, it's true.

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.

I've always wanted to throw a party where everyone comes with their mother's meatloaf. Everybody could evoke their mother's memory through her meatloaf.

My memory's not too good.

My favorite memory is my five years with the Nuggets. From my first day to my last day is a great memory. There wasn't a year that I was a Nugget that I didn't think we succeeded.

I have a memory problem. My family and friends call me Lady Ghajini.

I have never seen a game's graphics look so sharp and clean. The sound design for the game is also unique on the Xbox. The memory on this system allowed us to provide the user with 5.1 Dolby surround sound for home theatre owners.

We never stop to consider that our beliefs are only a relative truth that's always going to be distorted by all the knowledge we have stored in our memory.

I don't remember much of my childhood. My father passed away when I was six, and sadly, I don't have the fuzziest, foggiest memory of him - what his voice was like, anything he ever said to me, nothing. My early years are a total blur.

I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop - it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics, but I trust my family jewels only to Linux.

I have no memory for what happens in what books. I don't know when I might remember a scene, but beats me what book it's in because there are 14 of them now.

Always remember those things that tend to strengthen and improve your understanding. You cannot learn without attention, neither retain those lessons that you have once learnt without frequently reflecting upon and reviewing them in your mind, by this means, things long past will remain impressed upon your memory.

It is of no use to commit whole pages to memory, merely to recite them once without hesitation, you must think of the meaning more than the words - of the ideas more than the language.

I have a terrible memory.

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.

Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory.

If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don't compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped.

Getting hurt and watching Tom Brady take over and beginning what's been just a spectacular run of his, and to come back and play in the AFC Championship Game against the Steelers in Pittsburgh, and help us win that game, is a memory that stands out very clearly.

When someone is looking down, they're saying no. When they're looking up, they're looking to their brain for memory. When they look to the left, they're looking for a lie or something they memorized. When they look to the right, they're feeling sorry - they don't want to answer.

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.

If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today.

I don't think I think when I play. I have a photographic memory for chords, and when I'm playing, the right chords appear in my mind like photographs long before I get to them.

I recognize that I'm probably the luckiest novelist in recent memory, because Sherman Alexie, a writer I greatly admire, raved about my book on 'The Colbert Report,' and then Mr. Colbert himself urged his viewers to buy it - on his show and on Twitter.

I have this horrific thing where I'm really bad with names and faces. I have an appalling memory. Someone will come up to me in the street and go, 'Eddie!', and I'll try and give myself time by going into overdrive, 'Hey, hi! Nice to see you!' and start a whole conversation because I can't distinguish between who I know and who I don't.

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.

Tony Judt's remarkable 'The Memory Chalet' was written from the prison of mute immobility.

In order to be an image of God, the spirit must turn to what is eternal, hold it in spirit, keep it in memory, and by loving it, embrace it in the will.

The American world had - seemingly, at least - become a Jeffersonian world by the election of 1800, which placed Thomas Jefferson in the presidency. Jefferson had been Hamilton's rival in the new government's early years, and Hamilton has figured in the public memory almost as much for that rivalry as for his positive achievements.

We have a memory cut in pieces. And I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one, the other rainbow.

It was quite difficult to find a place to do what we wanted, namely to study the neurological basis of behaviour and especially learning and memory, which we were particularly interested in.

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.

My mother relied on her memory to do things because she couldn't read. Part of that was not really knowing numbers.

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory, let us now commit it to life.

When I played the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve, I got to bring Wiley, my 85-pound black lab. He's responsible for my favorite New Year's memory of all: At the end of the show, he ran onstage and then out across all the tables in the showroom, sending champagne glasses and gamblers flying.

The appearance of aged persons is too well known to make detailed description necessary. The skin of the face is dry and wrinkled and generally pale. The hairs on the head and the body are white. The back is bent, and the gait is slow and laborious, whilst the memory is weak. Such are the most familiar traits of old age.

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

How cruelly sweet are the echoes that start, When memory plays an old tune on the heart.

What you possess is not what you jingle in the pockets of your memory, but the imaginings with which you fill the spaces of the future.