Gretchen Rubin Quotes

I've always been steady on and off keeping diaries and journals. I try to document everything so I can remember it the older I get.

How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

We cannot develop and print a memory.

About the only thing that I have - or had, because it's failing me lately - is my memory. I had a really good memory. I was always terribly protective of that fact.

I don't keep a diary or a journal. Sometimes I'll send emails to friends, and that's a way of recording what I was thinking at any given time. But I've never been a journal keeper.

My impression is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience.

If it's hard to remember, it'll be difficult to forget.

In terms of long-term durable storage, the human mind, paradoxically, is pretty good, but it's very fragile.

I have a great memory.

Why do we remember stuff from when we were 5 years old but not important facts that are more recent?

I've been keeping tour journals since I was 17 years old.

I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that I kept a diary - actually, quite a number of them over the years.

I don’t want these memories to become slippery, to just disappear into the thin air of life the way most things seem to. I want them to stick – even the bad ones – so I repeat them often.

Memories are not recycled like atoms and particles in quantum physics; they can be lost forever.

I keep boxes filled with recuerdos - little memories that are in the form of pictures and events that I've written down. It's funny that I chose to write them in Spanish rather than English or Portuguese.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

You know that old joke about potheads having bad memories? Well, the bad memories are like pain, discomfort, and fear. So you lose all that, and the body reacts by healing faster and stronger.

A bad memory is the mother of invention.

Without doubt, keep a diary. From the day you're born, keep a diary, because we all forget things so quickly.

You have not forgotten to remember; You have remembered to forget. But people can forget to forget. That is just as important as remembering to remember - and generally more practical.

I used to do horseback riding in the South, and it was just things I'd be pasting. I think my diaries was just an infantile desire to record things. I liked saving things instead of writing.

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

I open journal, I look at the picture and I remember where I was. And I remember the time of day, the temperature of the air, what music was playing, or who was talking to me, or who was looking over my shoulder and what conversations we had and the smells of the earth and the time of year it was. It's all there for me in a way that we don't get looking at a snapshot. Most of us look back at a snapshot from ten years ago and say, where was that? We don't even remember where we were.