Tobias Wolff Quotes

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 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.

Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

You never realize what a good memory you have until you try to forget something.

Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.

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.

For someone who can’t remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can’t forget.

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.

My brain is like a hard drive. Once you start adding new information, you start cutting off old information.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

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

Short term memory is not good.

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

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?

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.

It doesn't matter how long you forget, only how soon you remember!

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

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 memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient-at others so bewildered and weak-and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control!

Memory. My poison, my food.

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

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

Memory is the power to revive again in our minds those ideas which after imprinting have disappeared, or have been laid aside out of sight.

I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.