Stephen Spender Quotes

You never forget where you were when you write a song; it's a very proper memory, so I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing for each track. It was like going into a time machine.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

Memory is a strange Bell—Jubilee, and Knell.

Music is stored in our long-term memory. When we learn something through music, we tend to remember it longer and believe it more deeply. Dr. Joyce Brothers

Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

A bad memory is the mother of invention.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

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.

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

Memory. My poison, my food.

To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember

The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness.

A great many complimentary things have been said about the faculty of memory, and if you look in a good quotation book you will find them neatly arranged.

I really rely a lot more on memory. I'm definitely not as good of a sight reader.

[...]my memory is reasonably good—unlike yours, dear sir!” “Mine is erratic,” he said imperturbably. “I remember only what interests me.

To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.

The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.

I like to capture moments. It's like a photograph. Ten years from now you look at the photograph and you don't remember it but rather the whole week or month around the photo.

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

...and trauma had a way of burning memories deeper into the mind.

Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum ) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be.

Why does the brain retain the memory of the hurt from yesterday?

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