Emily Dickinson Quotes

Memory. My poison, my food.

I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.

Memory is imagination pinned down.

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

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

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time.

All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.

We all remember things, it's what we remember that determines how we live.

Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

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.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.

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.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

Vision sometimes comes in a memory.

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.

When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.

Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

When it comes to jump-starting the intricate machinery of recollection, there's nothing more effective than the scent of approaching death.