Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Michael C. Hall

I think Dexter is a man who ... a part of himself is very much frozen, or arrested in a place that is pre-memory, pre-conscious, pre-verbal. Something very traumatic happened to him, he doesn't know what that is. And I think on some level he wants to know. He denies his humanity, he describes himself as someone who is without feeling, and yet I think that he maybe suspects - in a way that maybe isn't even conscious yet when we first meet him - that he is in fact a human being.

Michael Cera

When I was 16, I was working on 'Arrested Development.' My memories of being 16 were just trying to keep up with school while doing the show and trying to be around all those people on the show, as much as I could.

Mel Torme

How many radio shows I did is lost to memory now; it's in the hundreds - maybe even close to being in the thousands - for the span of years from the time I was eight till I was about fifteen.

Mason Cooley

Memory is imagination pinned down.

Mason Cooley

Memories contain hidden editorials on current events.

Mason Cooley

Mild brown eyes beckon me to the past, but memory provides no clue.

Mason Cooley

Literature gives us a memory of lives we did not lead.

Mason Cooley

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

Mary Karr

I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street I grew up on.

Mary Karr

Memoir is not an act of history, but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

Michael Grant

Guilt was a fascinating thing: it seemed not to weaken over time. If anything it grew stronger as the circumstances faded from memory, as the fear and the necessity became abstract. And only her own actions stood out with crystal clarity.

Michael Chabon

I have a good memory for words, and when I come upon a word I don't know, I remember it, or try to - it's almost like a tic.

Michael Connelly

Now I'm writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.

Michael Chabon

A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos –like amber in which a memory gets trapped.

Michael Chabon

I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.

Menachem Begin

In the name of Jerusalem. If I forget the extermination of the Jews, may my right hand wither, may my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you, if I do not keep the extermination of the Jews in memory even at my happiest hour.

Michio Kaku

There are so many wonders awaiting us. If we can upload memories, then we might be able to combat Alzheimers, as well as create a brain-net of memories and emotions to replace the internet, which would revolutionize entertainment, the economy, and our way of life. Maybe even to help us live forever, and send consciousness into outer space.

Michel Faber

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

Michel Patini

The 1984 European Championships were held in France and that was something important. I felt on form then, even though I was practically always injured at all the World Cups. It's a great memory. But in any case, the past is past.

Michel Houellebecq

I've lived so little that I tend to imagine I'm not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.

Michel Foucault

I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.

Marie Lu

The memory fades, and I’m left hanging on to the ghosts of his words.

Marge Piercy

I don't find that writing about parts of my life had much effect except in some cases to improve my memory. To get into parts of the past I want to recall very vividly, I use a form of directed meditation.