Amy Tan Quotes

The more intelligible a thing is, the more easily it is retained in the memory, and counterwise, the less intelligible it is, the more easily we forget it.

It is no learning to understand what you do not retain.

Nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered.

The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.

Language is a nice way to remember things.

A man of great memory without learning hath a rock and a spindle and no staff to spin.

We don't really understand something until we have forgotten it.

A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise.

I delight sometimes in saying to - as when I'm a teacher, I love saying, 'This is really important, so don't write it down.' To me, what you retain is a very important filter.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

I can read a four-page scene once and have it memorized. It's a skill you learn in school: disposable cramming.

When you're very young and you learn something - a fact, a piece of information, whatever - it doesn't connect to anything.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

When you learn a thing, try to use it sufficiently often not to forget it!

If you will give the matter a moment's thought, you'll see that memory is the highest faculty of the human mind.

Sometimes you just need words on a page to memorize.

I am a sponge. I don't write things down.

Reading is a bridge to thought.

I like to read and understand.

I just have pretty good recall of information.

Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy

The nature of our intelligence is such that it is stimulated far less by the will to know than by the will to understand.

That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing. Could I have remembered, as some men do, what I read, I should have been able to call myself an educated man. But that power I have never possessed. Something is always left--something dim and inaccurate--but still something sufficient to preserve the taste for more. I am inclined to think that it is so with most readers.