Recollection Of Memories Quotes & Sayings

In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody's memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory, some memories are lost by the passage of time, psychological defense mechanisms screen other memories from detection, the ephemeral character of other memories are invariably to elusive to arrest with reciprocal language. — Kilroy J. Oldster

[She] had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the original - one emotion that time could never fade, and that would drag you back any number of years into the pure, undiluted feeling, as if you were living it anew. It wasn't love ... and it wasn't hate, or anger, or happiness, or even grief. Memories of those were but echoes of the true feeling.
It was shame. Shame never faded. — Laini Taylor

Thus, the "memories" that people reported contained little information about the event they were trying to recall (the speaker's tone of voice) but were greatly influenced by the properties of the retrieval cue that we gave them (the positive or negative facial expression). — Daniel L. Schacter

This was a voice that drew out memories stretched thin by years of recollection, like paper unfolded and refolded too many times. A voice that brought back, like a wave, the memory of another time on this bridge, a night so long ago, everything black and silver and the river rushing away under her feet ... — Cassandra Clare

Let us remember the loving-kindness of the Lord and rehearse His deeds of grace. Let us open the volume of recollection, which is so richly illuminated with memories of His mercy, and we will soon be happy. — Alistair Begg

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past. — Theodor Adorno

Our most potent memories include the taste and smells of foods we enjoyed as a child in part because it reminds us of who fed us a meal. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I keep thinking my father gave me Turgenev, and then I realize at some point, Oh, this is a false memory. I mean, that's one of the things that interests me about memoir. It should be as much about how we remember, and that includes false memories, and the realization that one is having a false memory. That's the kind of an interesting way of layering the whole experience of recollection. — Marco Roth

It is also possible within this lifetime to enhance the power of the mind, enabling one to reaccess memories from previous lives. Such recollection tends to be more accessible during meditative experiences in the dream state. Once one has accessed memories of previous lives in the dream state, one gradually recalls them in the waking state. — Dalai Lama

May tender memories soften your grief, May fond recollection bring you relief, And may you find comfort and peace in the thought Of the joy that knowing your loved one brought ... For time and space can never divide Or keep your loved one from your side. When memory paints in colors true, the happy hours that belonged to you. — Helen Steiner Rice

Imagination and recollection of cherished memories of the pastimes are closely related. We do not recall memories verbatim. As our perspective changes regarding our place in the world, we shift through our recollections and revise our memories. People possess the ability to edit their memories by repressing unbearable episodes and highlighting incidences that generate fond memories. How we perceive and comprehend ourselves in the past, the present, and the future shapes our evolving sense of self. Humankind's ability to repress unpleasant events and humankind's ability to act as the solo editors of our germinating awareness of the world that we occupy is ultimately responsible for activating our metamorphosing sense of identity. — Kilroy J. Oldster

It's entirely possible that there are memories you have buried or repressed, memories formed when you were too young to have a conscious recollection of them, that Brother Jeremiah can reach. It could help us a great deal. — Cassandra Clare

The strangest thing in all man's travelling is that he should carry about with him incongruous memories. There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only who is foreign, and now and then, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth. — D.E. Stevenson

To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember — Jimmy Hoffa

That is just the way with Memory; nothing that she brings to us is complete. She is a willful child; all her toys are broken. I remember tumbling into a huge dust-hole when a very small boy, but I have not the faintest recollection of ever getting out again; and if memory were all we had to trust to, I should be compelled to believe I was there still. — Jerome K. Jerome

When everything is dark, when we are surrounded by despairing voices, when we do not see any exits, then we can find salvation in a remembered love, a love which is not simply a recollection of a bygone past but a living force which sustains us in the present. Through memory, love transcends the limits of time and offers hope at any moment of our lives. — Henri Nouwen

Our essential humanity is dependent upon humankind's ability to join the past and the future with the present. Recollections and future projections grant us the ability to cogitate, analyze, and evaluate. Contrasting memories enable us to ascertain what is true and false, and determine what is charming, attractive, stunning, or sublime. Remembrance of the past serves to comfort us, awareness of the future offers us hope, while our dutiful engagement in the present is capable of arresting our complete attention. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Her memory was awful after she'd been drinking, like a broken film reel. Whole segments of time were missing, fuzzy, unsalvageable. In fact, her recollection of most her life seemed to be full of taunting gaps, so that she only had a handful of memories to look back on. — Jack Jordan

To us, recollection is a holy act; we sanctify the present by remembering the past. To us Jews, the essence of faith is memory. To believe is to remember. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Let memories of your own hometown flow back to you as you read this fascinating story, "A Place called Gouyave," about the author's recollection of the characters, stories and the lessons learnt in his hometown during his youth on the Caribbean island of Grenada. — Collis Decoteau

Missing someone is the worst form of torture because it never goes away no matter where you are or what you do with your life. When a person is gone and all you have of them is a fuzzy recollection of what it was like to hear your phone buzz with texts from them, the joy you experienced while in their company, that instance when the bond you shared shattered, you long for all that was lost and could've been gained. You have memories and nothing more. And no matter how much times passes, you still feel the ache of their absence whenever they rise into your thoughts. Torture. — Caroline George

Like the apple bruising Kafka's beetle, each of these pellets of recollection lodged in Moose's flesh, releasing its cargo of memories of all the things he had lost - "Not lost! Gained!" Moose thundered aloud, but now, mercifully, that debate (lost or gained?) was supplanted in his mind by the proximity of Belmont Harbor and the yacht club. Yes, this was the place; Moose eased the station wagon into a parking space, desperate to free himself of its chassis, whose sole purpose, it now seemed, was to hold him still so that these bullets of memory could assault him, enter his flesh and release their shrapnel of foolish and unreliable nostalgia. — Jennifer Egan

Perhaps all memories are inherently sad, even the happy ones, and should for that reason be avoided. Nostalgia is not so much the recollection of things past as the recollection of things you are no longer connected to. — Simon Wroe

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

For a man must have intelligence of universals, and be able to proceed from the many particulars of sense to one conception of reason;
this is the recollection of those things which our soul once saw while following God
when regardless of that which we now call being she raised her head up towards the true being. And therefore the mind of the philosopher alone has wings; and this is just, for he is always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which He is what He is. And he who employs aright these memories is ever being initiated into perfect mysteries and alone becomes truly perfect. But, as he forgets earthly interests and is rapt in the divine, the vulgar deem him mad, and rebuke him; they do not see that he is inspired. — Plato

Bad days my memory functions no better than an out-of-focus kaleidoscope, but other days me recall is painfully perfect. — Mordecai Richler

That's the blessing and the curse of loss: You don't get to choose what falls within the inevitable dissolution of recollection or what lingers and haunts you late at night, your head heavy with memories, while your husband dreams of scaling walls in spandex tights.This is who I am: someone who simultaneously longs for and fears the commitment of remembering. There is the forgetting, the disintegration of memory, morsel by morsel; and there is the impossibility of forgetting, the scar tissue, with is insulated layers of padding. Both haunt me in their own way. — Julie Buxbaum

Memories of that which we have lost are curious things - weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had and I have no longer — Alexander McCall Smith

Since these words went into William's fermenting little brain not as word memories, but as circuitry for storing word memories, bricks used to build the kiln for firing bricks, he has no recollection of the rhyme, yet the ideas in it are axioms of his mental geometry. — Dennis Vickers

There can be no intellectual, spiritual, or emotional life without the substratum of memory. Without cognition and awareness of beauty and appreciation of our limited time on planet Earth, humankind's sojourn would be a colorless collage composed of the base acts of a biological mass endeavoring merely to survive. Without the ability to recall striking memories, our emotional life would be stillborn. Absent authentic memories, our life struggles would seem purposeless: human beings would exhibit no capacity to reflect awe when witnessing the bounty of nature's plenitude or be able to take in and express intense reverence for all that is sacred. Without memory, there would not be a dais to support faith or any ability to imagine a God; the concepts of good and evil would be nonexistent; and the past and the future would become less relevant than the choice between salt or pepper, and paper or plastic. — Kilroy J. Oldster

This sound, which like all music--indeed, like all pleasure--I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber, the voices and the nimble commotion, the perennial tribe of cats and dogs and birds, "laughter and ability and Sighing, And Frocks and Curls." All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon, even as what I had set out so deliberately to do was more than I could inflict on those memories, and upon those, so close to me, with whom the memories were bound. And just as powerfully I realized I could not commit this desecration on myself. — William Styron

The erection of a monument is superfluous, our memory will endure if our lives have deserved it. — Pliny The Younger

We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because for a time they are not remembered; he may, therefore, justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind. — Samuel Johnson

And yet, though desirous to be gone, she could not quit the mansion-house, or look an adieu to the cottage, with its black, dripping and comfortless veranda, or even notice through the misty glasses the last humble tenements of the village, without a saddened heart. Scenes had passed in Uppercross which made it precious. It stood the record of many sensations of pain, once severe, but now softened; and of some instances of relenting feeling, some breathings of friendship and reconciliation, which could never be looked for again, and which could never cease to be dear. She left it all behind her, all but the recollection that such things had been. — Jane Austen

The origin of the political relations between the United States and France is coeval with the first years of our independence. The memory of it is interwoven with that of our arduous struggle for national existence. Weakened as it has occasionally been since that time, it can by us never be forgotten, and we should hail with exultation the moment which should indicate a recollection equally friendly in spirit on the part of France. — John Quincy Adams