Penelope Lively Quotes

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.

I don't think forgetting is an important feature of human memory. I think it's important to be able to remember things accurately.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

I have found that all of my memories seem to need a place and that a good part of what we think of as explicit memory has to do with location.

Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.

I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.

I've been around a long time, and I've been interested in memory for a long time. And one of my earlier interests in molecular biology of memory led me to define the switch that converts short term to long term memory.

As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

While the hippocampus itself doesn't store memories, it serves to triage our experiences based upon their survival significance.

'Mnemonic' is a play about memory.

Some people say they use images to help them remember intricacies. Others say they just remember. If they are able to form an image of the face, it is because they remember how it was: it is not that an image guides memory, but that memory produces an image, or the sense of imaging. We have no agreed way to talk clearly about such things.

Memory is a big one: our ability to use the memory and move things in and out efficiently - that affected what we were able to do more than anything.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

The incidence of memory is like light from dead stars whose influence lingers long after the events themselves.

For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.

It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

The way real memories work, from what we understand, is really complex. And it's an interconnection of different things and redundancy in the brain. So the idea of a memory existing as a little snow globe - the way we represent it in the film - is actually not scientifically accurate at all.

Forgetting and remembering are governed by laws, but we cannot find out what they are.

Memory - the very skin of life.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.