Francoise Gilot Quotes

All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.

Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.

Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.

Memory works according to meaning, and when something is important to you, the Google in your brain brings it forward all of a sudden.

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.

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.

Let us say in the pocket of one of my old coats I find a movie ticket from many years ago. Once I see the ticket, not only do I remember that I saw this movie, but also scenes from this movie, which I think I have entirely forgotten, come back to me. Objects have this power, and I like it.

Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

Memory is imagination pinned down.

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

That reminds me of something that happened to me when I was a kid.

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.

When it comes to jump-starting the intricate machinery of recollection, there's nothing more effective than the scent of approaching death.

Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

Some things we forget. But many things we remember on the mental screen, which is the biggest screen of all.

The way that you remember your life, it's never linear. You have flashes of different moments of your life, and the flashes aren't equal; they have different styles.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.