Maria Konnikova Quotes

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

He who forgets will be destined to remember.

Remembrance of things past.

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it.

I exist only in the past.

I have a great memory.

Not only is the past of a person with no memory inaccessible; his ability to think about the future is imperilled. Time travel, then, is ultimately - and paradoxically - an exercise in remembering. And without that capacity it simply cannot exist.

The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

Recalling, for me, is a great way of living, so not to forget.

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.

When I'm 60, maybe, I'll look at my pile of papers and wonder, What really happened that year?

There is no fence nor hedge round time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it if you can remember.

I do not exactly remember at what period I started my museum which absorbed so much of my time.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory. I like the atmospheres that result if episodes are narrated through the haze of memory.

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