David Brooks Quotes

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, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

I love that the idea of examining memory, and the way memory is edited was made more interesting because it was being filtered through a writer.

Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius.

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 everything. Without it we are nothing.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.

Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.

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

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.

The way real memories work, from what we understand, is really complex. And it's an interconnection of different things and redundancy in the brain. So the idea of a memory existing as a little snow globe - the way we represent it in the film - is actually not scientifically accurate at all.

Organizing facts in terms of principles and ideas from which they may be inferred is the only known way of reducing the quick rate of loss of human memory.

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

Moreover, joint occurrences tend to be better recalled than instances when the effect does not occur. The proneness to remember confirming instances, but to overlook disconfirming ones, further serves to convert, in thought, coincidences into causalities.

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 not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.

Memory... is an internal rumor.

Memory feeds imagination.

My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important.

I've learned that memories can have a physical, almost living presence.

Why did happy memories fade and blur until one could scarcely recall them at all, while horrible memories seemed to retain their blinding clarity and painful sharpness?

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.