#memory

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve? ↗

— Julian Barnes

#history #mellow #memory #merit #nostalgia

A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#existence #memory #change

We humans are different--our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them. Our recollections change in their retelling. ↗

— Mira Bartok

#memory #change

Classifying depression as an illness serves the psychiatric community and pharmaceutical corporations well; it also soothes the frightened, guilty, indifferent, busy, sadistic, and unschooled. To understand depression as a call for life-changes is not profitable. Stagnation is not a medical term. The 17.5 million Americans diagnosed as suffering a major depression in 1997 were mostly damned. (Psychobiological examinations confuse cause and symptom.) Deficient serotonergic functioning, ventral prefrontal cerebral cortex, dis-inhibition of impulsive-aggressive behavior, blah blah blah: the medical lexicon boils emotion from human being. Go take a drug, the doctor says. Pain is a biochemical phenomenon. Erase all memory. ↗

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke

#biochemical-phenomenon #cause-and-symptom #disinhibition #doctors #drugs

VLADIMIR: (after a moment of bewilderment). We'll see when the time comes. (Pause.) I was saying that things have changed here since yesterday. ESTRAGON: Everything oozes. VLADIMIR: Look at the tree. ESTRAGON: It's never the same pus from one second to the next. VLADIMIR: The tree, look at the tree. Estragon looks at the tree. ESTRAGON: Was it not there yesterday? VLADIMIR: Yes of course it was there. Do you not remember? We nearly hanged ourselves from it. But you wouldn't. Do you not remember? ESTRAGON: You dreamt it. VLADIMIR: Is it possible you've forgotten already? ESTRAGON: That's the way I am. Either I forget immediately or I never forget. ↗

— Samuel Beckett

#change

In spite of the three hours I spent combing over the details, I have, to this day, a very persistent certainty that hidden inside me is the revolting knowledge of days when I wasn't quite myself. I now suspect that my inexplicable bouts of exhaustion are due to the massive effort of keeping those days behind me. ↗

— Tony Burgess

#memory #change

You wanted to believe that getting older, growing up, would change everything, transform you into the amazing person you were meant to be. But what if it didn't? What if you had to stay you forever? ↗

— Jean Thompson

#destiny #heart #humanity #identity #learning

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#courage

Memoria - fie memoria individuală, fie memoria colectivă care este cultura - are o dublă funcție. Una, într-adevăr, e să conserve anumite date, cealaltă să cufunde în uitare informațiile ce nu ne folosesc și care ne-ar putea încărca inutil mințile. ↗

— Jean-Claude Carrière

#memory #mind #dating

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs. ↗

— Graham Greene

#memory #death