I have a hot memory, but I know I've forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival.
The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels.
Once I'd reached the point where I could squirrel away more than 30 digits a minute in memory palaces, I still only sporadically used the techniques to memorize the phone numbers of people I actually wanted to call. I found it was just too simple to punch them into my cell phone.
After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.
I have a two-story house and a bad memory, so I'm up and down those stairs all the time. That's my exercise.
God has given each one of us a gift greater than a thousand I.B.M. machines. It is called a memory, and everything that passes through our five senses is stored in this faculty.
In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; there's a great deal of memory in them.
Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come of nothing.
There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).
All of Wes Anderson's films are confections, memoirs created in cinematic snow globes, with the subtext that memory is the most extraordinary confection of all.
My first boxing memory is watching Marvin Hagler and Sugar Ray Leonard on television.
My first joke that ever aired on 'Late Night' was for a list of 'Top 10 Least Popular Summer Camps.' My contribution - 'Camp Tick in beautiful Lyme, Connecticut' - squeaked in at No. 10. Like a trip to Camp Tick, my time at 'Late Night' faded into memory like a short session at a dicey summer camp.
As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular - or supremely practical - replies.
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.
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
Sweet is the memory of past troubles.
By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn't need pen or paper - my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.
My memory of those places is better than my pictures. That's why I get much more satisfaction out of shooting thematic work that has to do with an idea that I'm searching for, or searching to express.
Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.
A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.
