Memory

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts- and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs - George Eliot, Middlemarch

Memories are not recalled in neat chronological order- instead, they are recalled by the association of one thing with another, which means that any attempt to put memory on film cannot be told like a conventional narrative - Yuriy Norhsteyn, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuriy_Norshteyn

We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life. We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us - Charles Bowden in Blood Orchid: "

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting - Milan Kundera

The existence of forgetting has never been proved. We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them - Friedrich Nietzsche

Only what is interior has proved to have substance and a determining value. As a result, all memory of outer events has faded, and perhaps these outer experiences were never so essential anyway - Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Flamingo edition 1989, p10-11

Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original... .it is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation - Rosalind D. Cartwright in The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives

Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment - H.Ellison