“A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”
“Time s the thief of memory”
“A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.”
“The root of oppression is loss of memory”
“Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.”
“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”
“Forbidden to remember, terrified to forget; it was a hard line to walk.”
“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.”
“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”
“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”
“You know what I think? she says. That people s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They re all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed em to the fire, they re all just paper. The fire isn t thinking Oh, this is Kant, or Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition, or Nice tits, while it burns. To the fire, they re nothing but scraps of paper. It s the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there s no distinction--they re all just fuel.”
“Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”
“Remember tonight... for it is the beginning of always”
“You should always be taking pictures, if not with a camera then with your mind. Memories you capture on purpose are always more vivid than the ones you pick up by accident.”
“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.”
“O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude...”
“Most have been forgotten. Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best. The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both.”