Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
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.
Memory is the power to revive again in our minds those ideas which after imprinting have disappeared, or have been laid aside out of sight.
I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?
I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.
Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.
Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.
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.
For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
