Famous Quotes & Sayings

Gene Wolfe

It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual.

Gail Collins

One very clear memory I have of college is that I never learned anything in the big lectures. I have a feeling I'd have done even worse if they'd been on a laptop screen.

Gabrielle Zevin

I'm allergic to sad memories. It's the worst.

I think the '70s are always inspiring to me. I was born then, so I have a lot of memories about how my parents were and what kinds of movies I was watching.

Frank McCourt

Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Ordinarily men exercise their memory much more than their judgment.

How confusing the beams from memory's lamp are; One day a bachelor, the next a grampa. What is the secret of the trick? How did I get so old so quick?

Og Mandino

The greatest legacy we can leave our children is happy memories.

Norman Mailer

The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.

Orhan Pamuk

I'm a relatively disciplined writer who composes the whole book before beginning to execute and write it. Of course, you can't hold - you cannot imagine a whole novel before you write it; there are limits to human memory and imagination. Lots of things come to your mind as you write a book, but again, I make a plan, chapter, know the plot.

Orhan Pamuk

The entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room.

Orhan Pamuk

After all, isn't the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.

Oliver Sacks

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

Oliver Sacks

Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

Oliver Sacks

Even when other powers have been lost and people may not even be able to understand language, they will nearly always recognize and respond to familiar tunes. And not only that. The tunes may carry them back and may give them memory of scenes and emotions otherwise unavailable for them.

Oliver Sacks

Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.

Oliver Sacks

And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: ‘A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound change.’ Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely.

Oliver Sacks

Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.

Oliver Sacks

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.

Olga Kurylenko

Music evokes so many feelings in us, memories, nostalgia, things that are connected to our past.

Octavio Paz

Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet.... The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.

Norman Vincent Peale

Hold the thought of all elements of the body working together in perfect rhythm.

Emilie Autumn

I am my heart's undertaker. Daily I go and retrieve its tattered remains, place them delicately into its little coffin, and bury it in the depths of my memory, only to have to do it all again tomorrow.

Emile M. Cioran

Those who believe in their truth -- the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men -- leave the earth behind them strewn with corpses. Religions number in their ledgers more murders than the bloodiest tyrannies account for, and those whom humanity has called divine far surpass the most conscientious murderers in their thirst for slaughter.

Emile M. Cioran

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

Ellen Goodman

It is, I suppose, the business of grandparents to create memories and the relative of memories: traditions. We want to lodge moments, like snapshots, in the fleeting video of time.

Ellen Glasgow

She must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest-in the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories.

Ellen Glasgow

Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.

Ellen DeGeneres

I don't think I remember my first memory.

Eric Ripert

I have more eating memories than cooking memories and many memories of being in the kitchen - I was always attracted to the kitchen - but nobody ever wanted me to touch anything.

Eric Ripert

For me, food is about memories, feelings, emotions, and so is Le Bernardin, and that's why it's not just a restaurant.