Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.
My earliest memory is dreamlike: in a small orchard or garden I am carried on the arm, I believe, of my father; there was a group of grown-ups, my mother among them, and the group was slowly walking in the orchard, it seems toward the house.
When I began we did not really have a lot of First Amendment law. It is really surprising to think of it this way, but a lot of the law - most of the law that relates to the First Amendment freedom of the press in America - is really within living 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.
If genetic memory or racial memory persists, is it possible that individual memory also exists from previous lives?
Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.
My hunger and desperation, being an actor, an out of work actor - my memory of that is as fresh as an open wound.
Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.
My earliest acting memory is making up a play for my mom and dad called The Lonesome Baby. I have no idea what The Lonesome Baby was about. I just remember the title. But I'm sure it was an epic.
Celebrate your child's achievement, then rotate it when the next mini-masterpiece comes along. Then chuck the old picture. Don't worry that you're throwing away a memory. Your children will remember your praise more than they will remember the picture with macaroni and glitter glued on it.
Unless a man feels he has a good enough memory, he should never venture to lie.
A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.
The future doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened in the past. But because we invented the idea of a future, we're the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.
The 'politics of memory' policy appears to work largely by insinuation.
A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.
Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.
My memory is not even what most people's is, much less what it oughta be for a discussion like this.
My earliest memory campaigning was going to the dump to get petition signatures or handing out literature.
My earliest memory is learning to read 'Muffin the Mule' when I was about three.
The very idea of carrying my memory into eternity devastated me, and I took refuge in atheism.
Memory is the personal journalism of the soul.
Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.
I would say my first golf memory was asking who Arnold Palmer was when he was always on the Pennzoil commercials. When I was a little kid I watched a lot of sports, but I didn't watch a lot of golf, and this guy was always on a tractor.
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.
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
We know something of the history of the spread of Christianity, but much passed from recorded memory and much was transmitted by tradition whose accuracy has been repeatedly questioned.
I was trying to figure out what a memory feels like.
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
Good laughs melt out of memory pretty quickly.
Nigel might have an earlier date, but I think it's unprecedented from my memory. So it is a reminder to everybody that the public can move very rapidly on some issues and therefore what looks settled may not be.
Grief is only the memory of widowed affections.
A good storyteller is a person with a good memory and hopes other people haven't.
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
Memory is a net: one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother, about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff, shrinks would say. I was eight, and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast.
