fluid memories
“She felt it was my version of events.” The best memoirists stress the subjective nature of reportage. Doubt and wonder come to stand as part of the story.
Mary Karr • The Art of Memoir
By the way, I’m also finding that there’s a Doppler effect in personal memory. The normal Doppler effect, the one we all learn about in high school, happens when an ambulance comes toward you on the street. Because the distance the sound needs to travel is shrinking as it approaches you, the frequency of the sound waves is compressed, so it sounds
... See moreAhmir "Questlove" Thompson • Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
GOD’S UNAVOIDABLE PRESENCE What can you ever really know of other people’s souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your
... See moreC. S. Lewis • The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration
Once again I was struck by one of the miracles of the cognitive process—that the act of writing will summon from the buried past exactly what we need exactly when we need it. Memory and intuition and chance associations will always generate a certain percentage of what any writer writes. The remainder is generated by reason.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
It was all I could do to get through each moment, and each moment felt like an endless hour, yet days slipped silently past. Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.
Elisabeth Tova Bailey • The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past. When given free rein, his imagination played with past events, often not important ones, but minor happenings and trifling things. His nostalgic memory glorified them and th
... See moreViktor E. Frankl • Man's Search For Meaning, Gift Edition
The snapshot is meant to preserve not just an image but the moment of its taking; its intention is not documentary so much as memorial, and when we look at it we are remembering more than we are actually seeing.
Adam Kirsch • Emblems of the Passing World
Memory begins to qualify the imagination, to give it another formation, one that is peculiar to the self. … If I were to remember other things, I should be someone else. —N. SCOTT MOMADAY