William Saroyan Quotes

My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important.

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths.

It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.

What business does memory have with time?

Memory feeds imagination.

Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

Memory was such a worthless thing, really. Nothing it dealt with was attainable. It was concerned with phantom acts and feelings, with all that was uncapturable except in thought. It was without satisfaction.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember.

I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

When the brain is working to remember something, similar patterns of neurons fire as they did during the perception of the original event. These networks are linked, and each time we revisit them, they become stronger and more associated. But they need the proper retrieval cues--words, smells, images-- for them to be brought back as memories

Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius.

For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

Our memories are independent of our wills.

A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

Memory. My poison, my food.