Memory Quotes
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A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good.
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More Memory Quotes
A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my Memory Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues, that syllable men's names On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses.
john milton— 1634 Comus, A Mask, l.204-8.
Some wonder why I have such a feeling of concern over the imposition of the death penalty. I ask those who wonder how would you feel if you defended a man charged with murder, who was as innocent as any hon. member in this House at this very moment, who was convicted; whose appeal was dismissed, who was executed; and six months later the star witness for the Crown admitted that he, himself, had committed the murder and blamed it on the accused? That experience will never be effaced from my Memory.
john diefenbaker— May 1, 1972, House of Commons.
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was"...It means to seize hold of a Memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
walter benjamin— VI
To have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintance and actions, when the hour arrives in which time is more nimble than Memory, is the reason which induces me to keep a journal: a journal in which I must confess my every thought, must open my whole heart!
frances burney— The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, vol. 1, p. 1, journal entry, March 27, 1768.
The leaves of Memory seemed to make A mournful rustling in the dark.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow— The Fire of Drift-wood, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Held in a lunar synthesis, Whispering lunar incantations Dissolve the floors of Memory And all its clear relations Its divisions and precisions.
— 1917 Prufrock and Other Observations,'Rhapsody on a Windy Night'.
All water has a perfect Memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
toni morrison— As quoted in Grace Notes (1989) by Rita Dove
For many years I believed that I remembered helping my grandfather drink his whisky toddy when I was six weeks old, but I do not tell about that any more, now; I am grown old, and my Memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the latter. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it.
mark twain— p. 210. (Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010))
To his teaching we owe it there is such a thing as Irish Nationalism and to the Memory of the deed he nerved his generation to do, to the Memory of ‘98, we owe it that there is any manhood left in Ireland.
patrick pearse— Ibid. (Sourced)
In plucking the fruit of Memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom.
Constantinus— 1920 The Arrow of Gold, author's note. AD Roman Emperor, who adoptedChristianity c.312 AD. He founded a royal residence at Byzantium (Constantinople), an act of great historical importance.
Of those four winters which I passed in Indo-China opium has left the happiest Memory.
— 1955 The Quiet American, introduction.
Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my Memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. 416
— 1933 'The Name and Nature of Poetry', Lecture at Cambridge, 9 May.
To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the Memory's vault and mix in a sad Memory from one's own life.
albert finney— As quoted in Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1988)
Necessity is the mother of invention. I love solving things like that. Because there wasn't enough Memory, thinking of an economical way to make the movements look right was like solving a puzzle, and I had a lot of fun.
shigeru miyamoto— Source: [2]
Originally, I wanted a machine that would cost $100. My idea was to spend nothing on the console technology so all the money could be spent on improving the interface and software. If we hadn't used NAND flash Memory [to store data such as games and photos] and other pricey parts, we might have succeeded.
shigeru miyamoto— Source: November 16, 2006 Business Week interview
You could make a good case that the history of social life is about the history of the technology of Memory. That social order and control, structure of governance, social cohesion in states or organizations larger than face-to- face society depends on the nature of the technology of Memory--both how it works and what it remembers... In short, what societies value is what they memorize, and how they memorize it, and who has access to its memorized form determines the structure of power that the society represents and acts from.
eben moglen— Talk titled "Freedom Business" @ The O'Reilly Media MySQL Conference, 2007-04-25 [5]
Each minute bursts in the burning room,The great globe reels in the solar fire,Spinning the trivial and unique away.(How all things flash! How all things flare!)What am I now that I was then?May Memory restore again and againThe smallest color of the smallest day:Time is the school in which we learn,Time is the fire in which we burn.
delmore schwartz— "Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day" in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938); this poem has also been printed under the title "For Rhoda" Full text online
Let every man in mankind's frailtyConsider his last day; and let nonePresume on his good fortune until he findLife, at his death, a Memory without pain.
Sophocles— Variant: Look upon him, O my Thebans, on your king, the child of fame!This mighty man, this Œdipus the lore far-famed could guess,And envy from each Theban won, so great his lordliness—Lo to what a surge of sorrow and confusion hath he come!Let us call no mortal happy till our eyes have seen the doomAnd the death-day come upon him—till, unharassed by mischance,He pass the bound of mortal life, the goal of ordinance.[Tr. E. D. A. Morshead (1885)]
— Variant: People of Thebes, my countrymen, look on Oedipus.He solved the famous riddle, with his briliance,he rose to power, a man beyond all power.Who could behold his greatness without envy?Now what a black sea of terror has overwhelmed him.Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day,count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.[quoted by Thomas Cahill in Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea]
— Line 1529, Choragos.
She was a form of life and light That seen, became a part of sight, And rose, where'er I turn'd mine eye, The morning-star of Memory! Yes, love indeed is light from heaven; A spark of that immortal fire With angels shared, by Alla given, To lift from earth our low desire.
lord byron— Line 1127 (The Giaour (1813))
Lately Marge's Memory had grown weak, which is to say that it no longer contained the past time on deposit there, it was not strong enough to keep shut up the moments, the mornings and evenings, of her long life, its seals broke, and her memories ran together mingling, indistinguishable from the present. Her Memory had grown incontinent with age.
john crowley— Bk. 6, Ch. 3
Not the individual man nor a single generation by its own power can erect the bridge that leads to God. Faith is the achievement of many generations, and effort accumulated over many centuries. … There is a collective Memory of God in the human spirit, and it is this Memory which is the main source of our faith.
abraham joshua heschel— "The Holy Dimension", p. 333
"The Amyrlin understands the most complex of creeds and debates," Egwene said, quoting from Memory. "Yet in the end, she is the servant of all, even the lowest of laborers."
robert jordan— Egwene al'Vere, quoting Balladare Arandaille, the first Amyrlin raised from the Brown Ajah
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of Memory.
james joyce— "James Clarence Mangan" (1902), a lecture on Mangan delivered at the Literary and Historical Society, University College, Dublin (1 February 1902) and printed in the college magazine St. Stephen's.
And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. […] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused Memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals my old and valued friends Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.
oliver sacks— p. 317 (Uncle Tungsten (2001))
Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its Memory.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel lecture prepared for the Swedish Academy, not actually delivered as an address (1970), variant translation, as quoted in TIME (25 February 1974). Another translations is "Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print", it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory".
We shall go according to the constant usage within Memory.
— Jefferies, C.J., Sacheverell's Case (1684), 10 How. St. Tr. 72.
To the Memory of Dr. Olfert Dapper, who saw a wild unicorn in the Maine woods in 1673, and for Robert Nathan, who has seen one or two in Los Angeles.
— Peter S. Beagle, on the dedication page of The Last Unicorn (1968)
