Joshua Foer Quotes

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

Learn poetry by heart. If you know a poem by heart, no one can take it away from you, and you can take advantage of it anytime.

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.

When you're an expert in a subject, you can retain new factoids on your favorite topic easily. This only works for the subjects you're truly passionate about, though. Baseball fans can reel off stats for their favorite players, then space out on their own birthday.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

As a child, I learned hundreds of poems by heart, which I can recite to this day.

I've got an awful memory, and I can't read or write, but you can read me a script once or twice, and I've got it.

I just have pretty good recall of information.

Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms wants not to be learned but to be learned by heart.

I have nothing from my childhood. I think you carry those books with you. It's like in [Ray] Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." Books are outlawed in this future society so people become the book they love by memorizing it.

Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads.

I carried recipes in my head like maps.

Nothing capable of being memorized is history.

Books were rare,expensive, time-consuming to create and copy, and difficult to transport. That is why collections ofprint-based books developed around centers of religious belief, learning, and wealth. It was cheaper andeasier for people to come to the collection than for the collection, or parts of the collection, to go to thepeople.

He that writeth in blood and proverbs doth not want to be read, but learnt by heart.

My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn't really tell stories but they were good talkers. That's important for a writer, to hear speakers.

If you're studying Geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but Philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

Our stories are what we have,” Our Good Mother says. “Our stories preserve us. we give them to one another. Our stories have value. Do you understand?

We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.

Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture.

Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar.

If you're serious about becoming a wealthy, powerful, sophisticated, healthy, influential, cultured and unique individual, keep a journal. Don't trust your memory. When you listen to something valuable, write it down. When you come across something important, write it down.