Ellen Potter Quotes

I can remember weird things from way back, but not what I had for breakfast.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

I have a terrible memory.

The hippocampus helps record both types of memories initially, and it helps retain them for the medium term. The hippocampus also helps us access old personal memories in long-term storage in other parts of the brain.

Why is it that I can remember so easily the lyrics to the opening theme song of 'Gilligan's Island?' Why do I remember these trivial things, and I can't remember the names of important collaborators?

Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths.

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 everything. Without it we are nothing.

We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember.

What a man can't remember doesn't exist for him.

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

I have a really terrible memory.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

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.

Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now,the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.

believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade.

People are machines of forgetfulness

Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

Memory was such a worthless thing, really. Nothing it dealt with was attainable. It was concerned with phantom acts and feelings, with all that was uncapturable except in thought. It was without satisfaction.

Memory is so crazy! It's like we've got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuff. Meanwhile, all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after the other.

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

For as long as I can remember, I've had memories.