Memory Decay Quotes

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.

People are machines of forgetfulness

Human memory is short and terribly fickle.

You don't forget the movies, but you forget the details of them.

Memories are not recycled like atoms and particles in quantum physics; they can be lost forever.

Great sex is wonderful while it's happening, but who remembers great sex they had in 1983?

A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness.

People can remember their childhood, but events from four or five years ago are in a never-never land.

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.

My memory is not that good anymore.

To conjure a particular knowledge you visualize an architectural structure and then you walk around and see the details that then bring back the words or the poetry or the lines of thought. Memory's going extinct because we rely on machines and copies and so on. The idea of working with structures that conjure dreams, personages, history, time, that can be contained in this way as you walk through your mind, is a challenge.

Why do we remember stuff from when we were 5 years old but not important facts that are more recent?

I am already sensible of decay in the power of walking, and find my memory not so faithful as it used to be. This may be partly owing to the incessant current of new matter flowing constantly through it; but I ascribe to years their share in it also.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid.

You don't just forget things overnight.

The critics tend to forget their own answers after a while.

Of all the faculties of the mind, memory is the first that flourishes, and the first that dies.

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

I do think I have a lesser ability to remember facts and names than I have done previously, because you never have to store them; you just look them up again. I could make the same recipe 15 times, but I'll never, ever remember how to make it because I'll just look it up.

Short term memory is not good.

She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.

It's very rare that a song falls from your mind complete.

The incidence of memory is like light from dead stars whose influence lingers long after the events themselves.

When you lose interest in anything, you also lose the memory for it.