John Steinbeck Quotes

... we do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.

Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through feeling. He does it through texture. It is all physically driven, that language.

I feel that the thing that probably aided me the most in that scene with the dog was the utilization and using an actual recreation, affective memory, if you want to call it, of pain.

I have a very conveniently photographic memory of emotions - it's overwhelming, because things don't fade for me.

The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and likewise pain.

My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone we're left with the concept, but not the true memory.

Some memories are best absorbed through your eyes in real time, even if you have no record of it later. Because then you can access that memory and how you felt in that moment. If you're looking at your cellphone screen, taking a video of something that is otherwise unforgettable, watching it later will not recover the emotion you would have had, had you witnessed it directly.

If you were feeling sad right now and you recall a sad - or, a very happy memory from the past, it will be tinged with more sadness based on your current feeling. So we felt like that was actually on solid scientific ground .

Pain or love or danger makes you real again.

Pleasure is a sort of oblivion, a forgetfulness. Pain is remembrance, you cannot forget pain.

Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.

The secret of poetry is cruelty.

People may correctly remember the events of twenty years ago (a remarkable feat), but who remembers his fears, his disgusts, his tone of voice? It is like trying to bring back the weather of that time.

For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else, either.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

Eric was holding my hands, and I was digging my nails into him like we were doing something else. He won't mind, I though, as I realized I'd drawn blood. And sure enough, he didn't. "Let go," he advised me, and I loosened my grip on his hands. "No, not of me," he said smiling. "You can hold on to me as long as you want.

Do you think it takes true pain to experience true pleasure?

Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.

Events become feelings, feelings become events

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

I do try to experience the emotions as they come, but sometimes it becomes just too much.

Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.

The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect.

There is a fallacy that the powerful emotion of youth mellows with time. Not true. One learns to control and suppress it. But it doesn't lessen. It simply hides and concentrates itself in more discreet places. When one accidentally stumbles into one of these abysses, the pain is spectacular.