“Indeed if memory helps us to survive, forgetting allows us to go on living. How could we go on with our daily lives, if we remained constantly aware of the dangers and ghosts surrounding us?”— Elie Wiesel, nobelprize.org
“Many people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn’t true. Our memories are constructive. They’re rec…”— Elizabeth Loftus, ted.com
“Give yourself whole to your best moment, to your greatest memory. It is this you must recognize as king of time, your greatest memory. The condition to which all discipline must bring you back. That which allows you to despise yourself, as well as rightly to approve yourself. Center of strength, of…”— Paul Valery, amazon.com
“Maybe the best way to remember anything accurately is to write it down and forget it, and then, only at the last moment of your life, to recall it—like listening to a broken tape by hand-feeding it one last time through the tape player.”— Sarah Manguso, amazon.com
“Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.”— Mark Lawrence, amazon.com
“There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.”— Gillian Flynn, amazon.com
“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”— John Updike, amazon.com
“I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every se…”— Franz Kafka, amazon.com