Memory Quotes - Page 13

The point, I decided, wasn't to have the autobiography or even the memories. The point was who I became when I wrote.

He knew perfectly well (even if he wasn’t inclined to admit it) that the material body had a spiritual aspect. He knew that “spirit,” however explained, was real, because of his own undeniable experiences - which, though he might suppress them, he couldn’t altogether erase from memory.

Consult your memory to know what matters most in your life.

Forgotten hero was never the real hero, real hero can not be forgotten.

We’re constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?

It is my conviction that when events are forgotten, buried in the cellar of the page, they are no longer even history.

Un recuerdo evocado demasiado a menudo y expresado en forma de historia tiende a convertirse en un estereotipo... cristalizado, perfeccionado, adornado, instalándose en sí mismo en lugar de la memoria pura y dura, y creciendo a sus expensas.

Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living.
that’s the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred years or only a few weeks. It’s all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers.

Mänsklighetens minne är bristfälligt och orättvist, och våra äldsta och största välgörare ha vi glömt.

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

Regard for the past only extends to its outward forms.

It is then he realises that certain things loom larger than forgiveness and reconciliation: memory, for one, and history, bloody history.

Facts you can bend. Memories are much stronger things.

The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it's the study of historians' studies. . . .
Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

Its really hard to recall the day you became friends with special people.

The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don't want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.

History is the diary of humankind; to forget it is to try to navigate the future with no memory of the past.