Memory Fading Quotes

In relative youth, we assume we'll remember everything. Someone should urge the young to think otherwise.

Third, consider the insistency of an idea. The insistency of a past idea with reference to the present is a quantity which is less, the further back that past idea is, and rises to infinity as the past idea is brought up into coincidence with the present.

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.

Memory is this one attempt to not be erased by time. And I think that ties back to what I learned watching my grandmother lose her memories is, you know, we are all facing erasure eventually.

And what did I think when I was small and why did I forget? And what else will I forget when I grow older? And if you forget is it as if it never happened? Will none of the things you saw or thought or dreamed matter?

Boy, you know, it's amazing how your brain can turn into a sieve, and you can literally forget episodes that you have shot.

I always think photographs abominable, and I don't like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love. Those photographic portraits wither much sooner than we ourselves do, whereas the painted portrait is a thing which is felt, done with love.

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

People talk from memory and memory often plays false.

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future.

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

The most important, the longest lasting, the strongest emotional, and the most practiced memories are the ones that are embedded the deepest in the brain, and because we have retrieved them so many times previously, they are the most able to be retrieved. We all hear about people who can remember their youth, their phone number, or street address from 70 years ago, but they cannot recall what they had for breakfast. The memory of this morning's breakfast wasn't rehearsed, and wasn't very important, so it fades away quickly.

The older I get, the less I remember.

If memories were indeed like what a camera records, they could be forgotten, or they could fade so that they are no longer clear and vivid. But it would be difficult to explain how people could have memories that are both clear and vivid while also being wrong. Yet that happens, and it is not infrequent.

Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.

One can never be sure whether a very early memory is a real memory or just the recollection of something which you were told happened.

And gradually his memory slipped a little, as memories do, even those with so much love attached to them; as if there is an unconscious healing process within the mind which mends up in spite of our desperate determination never to forget.

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off.

I do think the past changes at a slower rate. It sits a little more still for its portrait.