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If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.

It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.

Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.

Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?

You can certainly get an idea of the value of memory if your memories can carry you out into the world no matter how utterly dissatisfied you may be with the present and wish you could get away from it.

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

Memory is a fiction we tell ourselves: just a piece of the truth.