Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.
Great actors are people who just meld into the part without calling attention to the fact that they are so-and-so doing this part. They may never become huge stars, but will always, in memory, stay respected actors.
I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I’m an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.
My father left when I was three, and I have no memory of him. The most significant male figures in my life were my grandfather, in whose house I lived during the first 10 years of my childhood, and later my stepfather.
I’m horrible at quoting movies! Even my very favorites are not easily recalled or programmed to memory. When people start movie quoting around me, I’m that person who just smiles and then looks up the reference later.
A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
I’ve given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.
Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?
The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.
Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.
The two places that I had most imprinted in my mind and in my memory were UCLA and Indiana. To play at one and coach at the other is unbelievable.
When I played the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve, I got to bring Wiley, my 85-pound black lab. He’s responsible for my favorite New Year’s memory of all: At the end of the show, he ran onstage and then out across all the tables in the showroom, sending champagne glasses and gamblers flying.
I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you’ve written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer’s memory that filters experience, but the reader’s as well.
The use of the wearable computer changes with each person. When this device is your way of seeing, or a seeing aid, it’s how you see the world. When you use it as a memory aid, it is your brain.
The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where ‘open form’ or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term ‘heightened speech.’
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie – ‘Casablanca,’ say – and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.
The first memory I have was my sisters dancing to the radio when they played records by Benny Goodman and Harry James and of the sort. But the record that got me was a record by Derek Sampson, who was a young guy, called ‘Boogie Express,’ and it was boogie-woogie. Really, it was on fire, and that got me.
An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.
I’d say my best memory was climbing Mt. Fuji, and the worst memory was… trying to fit my feet into the free giveaway slippers at Japanese schools.
I have that memory of dancing on my father’s feet to all the music my parents used to listen to.
A liar should have a good memory.
My children, as long as you live, the shadow of the Hiss Case will brush you. In every pair of eyes that rests on you, you will see pass, like a cloud passing behind a woods in winter, the memory of your father – dissembled in friendly eyes, lurking in unfriendly eyes.
I temporarily became a surgeon for ‘Memory of Love’. I spent two weeks in an operating theatre, watching amputations, and I loved it.
Our memory and the movies keep movie stars alive for us, and Tony Curtis is still a star.
The shot of Kapil Dev kissing the World Cup and hordes of Indian fans all over at Lord’s is etched in my memory. Every Indian is proud of that victory, and every Indian player who has played the World Cup after that ’83 win wants to bring the Cup home.
Sweet is the memory of past troubles.
My earliest memory is nursing and struggling to see the colored lights making up the map of the world, the famous backdrop for Larry King’s TV show. There’s an ‘I-want-to-do-all-things-at-once’ kind of theme to it.
I like very human stories that venture into sci-fi or the supernatural or areas that I think occupy a lot of space in our collective memory for the films that we loved as children.
I feel like, with ski racing, you need to have a short memory. You crash all the time, and sometimes it’s a really bad one, but sometimes it’s not so bad.
My first memory is of the eyes of my brother; he was looking at me all the time.
Earliest musical memory is probably being scared stiff with my family’s band as a youngster on stage playing the conga drums.
That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.
I think 90% of my ideas evaporate because I have a terrible memory and because I seem to be committed to not scribble anything down. As soon as I write it down, my mind rejects it.
From a very young age, I would fall off the bed and wake up on the floor because of dreams. I have a memory from the age of four in which I felt God.
It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
I have a vivid memory of loving Keith Hernandez, the first baseman for the ’86 Mets. I grew up in Queens, so when the Mets won the World Series that year, it was a big deal.
We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.
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.
Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.
I’m very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.
Memory is a net: one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
With Alzheimer’s, recent memory is affected first. At the start, you count the memory loss in days, then hours – then in minutes. But there’s also an insidious backward creep of deterioration.
Rather than studying the most complex form of memory in a very complicated animal, we had to take the most simple form – an implicit form of memory – in a very simple animal. So I began to look around for very simple animals. And I focused in on the marine snail Aplysia.
There’s a lot in my closet. I’ve been collecting things since I was five. I’m definitely a pack rat. I’m not a hoarder, but I’m definitely a pack rat. I will keep anything if I have a memory in it or a good moment.
I’m a summer baby, so I usually have my birthday as a good summer memory.
Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.
I have all of the Apple products. Everything I’ve ever written, I’ve written on a Mac. My first computer, my roommates and I chipped in, and we got that first Macintosh – 128K. It had as much memory as a greeting card that plays music.
As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer’s because it attacks the two things most central to a writer’s craft – language and memory, which together make up an individual’s identity. Alzheimer’s makes a new character out of a familiar person.
I still cherish the memory of walking into the Parliament for the first time.
I accomplished something big and that’s a memory I will never forget.
I’m thankful that my memory is good because my vision is going.
The earliest maps were ‘story’ maps. Cartographers were artists who mingled knowledge with supposition, memory and fears. Their maps described both landscape and the events, which had taken place within it, enabling travellers to plot a route as well as to experience a story.
Migration gives a blank cheque to put anything you don’t feel like addressing in the memory hold. No neighbours can go against the monster narrative of your family.
I discovered that Thailand was one of those countries, like Sri Lanka and India, where memory of past lives used to be commonplace. Go back a few generations, and you find people talking about earlier lives with total certainty.
Memory depends mainly upon myth. Some even occurs in our minds, in actuality or in fantasy; we form it in memory, molding it like clay day after day – and soon we have made out of that event a myth. We then keep the myth in memory as a guide to future similar situations.
Studies by many labs have already started to identify specific circuits of neurons involved in normal cognitive function like memory and learning, as well as disease processes such as Parkinson’s disease, depression, and autism.
