Michael Chabon Quotes

Language is a nice way to remember things.

My mother had been a Latin teacher, and she was always very fascinated with words. She and I shared books and responded to them.

Man can no more think without words than see without light.

I'm a massive fan of the dictionary.

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

I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

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.

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.

Yes, time can be buoyed by wordlessness, but it needs to be anchored in words.

Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

For it was not so much that by means of words I came to a complete understanding of things, as that from things I somehow had an experience which enabled me to follow the meaning of words.

I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

One day these will just be memories that I haveso I try to enjoy it as much as possible

But sometimes what we call 'memory' and what we call 'imagination' are not so easily distinguished.

The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others.

She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.

We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because for a time they are not remembered; he may, therefore, justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind.

Thought is not merely expressed in words, it comes into existence through them

My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching but...precede it.

One should cultivate good habits of memory, for it is capable of making existence a Paradise or an Inferno.

To learn from experience, we must remember it, and, for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend.