Memory Persistence Quotes

Why are women so fond of raking up the past? They're as bad as tailors, who invariably remember what you owe them for a suit long after you've ceased to wear it.

Every single song that I've listened to is in my memory forever.

Memories are contrary things; if you quit chasing them and turn your back, they often return on their own.

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.

The past is always with you. Some people want to be protected from this truth.

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.

Mental states of every kind, - sensations, feelings, ideas, - which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist.

I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.

Our memory is a monster; you forget it - it does not.

Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.

Even though you've given up a past it hasn't given you up. It comes uninvited - and sometimes half welcome.

The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear.

Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

The more distressing the memory, the more persistent it's presence.

If genetic memory or racial memory persists, is it possible that individual memory also exists from previous lives?

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

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.

Once you read something, you can't erase it from your brain.

You will remember when a bird crashed through the window and fell to the floor. You will remember, those of you who were there, how it jerked its wings before dying, and left a spot of blood on the floor after it was removed. But who among you was first to notice the negative bird it left in the window? Who first saw the shadow that the bird left behind, the shadow that drew blood from any finger that dared to trace it, the shadow that was better proof of the bird's existence than the bird ever was?

The past did affect the present and the future, in ways you could see and a million ones you couldn't. Time wasn't a thing you could divide easily; there was no defined middle or beginning or end. I could pretend to leave the past behind, but it would not leave me.

I believe - what did Faulkner say? "The past is not even past."

In certain favorable moods, memories -- what one has forgotten -- come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible -- I often wonder -- that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them?

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.