Czeslaw Milosz Quotes

Isn't it fortunate how selective our recollections usually are.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

People don't really absorb everything they read or hear. They just look at it quickly, and then they choose to remember what they want to remember.

Sometimes it's a good thing we don't remember things half as well as books do.

He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. -Hazel, Cannery Row

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.

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

As for my memory, I have a particularly good one. I never keep any record of my investigations or experiments. My memory files all these things away conveniently and reliably. I should say, though, that I didn’t cumber it up with a lot of useless matter.

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

Most people don't remember names, for the simple reason that they don't take the time and energy necessary to concentrate and repeat and fix names indelibly in their minds. They make excuses for themselves; they are too busy.

Estragon: I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.

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

The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

A bad memory is the mother of invention.

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.

Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points.

Statesmen remember things selectively.

Few have wished for memory so much as they have longed for forgetfulness.

Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.

Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.

There is nothing that makes a man more self-satisfied than a poor memory.

Experience teaches that a strong memory is generally joined to a weak judgment.