Jess Walter Quotes

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

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

Our perception of time is really driven by our perception of the unfamiliar, vivid, and new.

Time is not a road - it is a room.

Time is but the space between our memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this space, time has disappeared.

Memory feeds imagination.

Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

To live (as I understand it) is to exist within a conception of time. But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time. Every memory, no matter how remote its subject, takes place 'Now,' at the moment it's called to the mind. The more something is recalled, the more the brain has a chance to refine the original experience. Because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.

Memory demands an image.

Memory is imagination pinned down.

A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

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.

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.

Human memory works its own wheel, and stops where it will, entirely without reference to the last stop, and with no connection with the next.

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

But sometimes what we call 'memory' and what we call 'imagination' are not so easily distinguished.

Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time. Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it. Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.

We do not hear what we hear..., only what we remember.

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