Memory - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872)

He awoke, with the sensation of spinning up from an abyss. Little thoughts came back, added to themselves, and presently chained themselves together to perform that miracle called memory.

- Ross Rocklynne, ''At the Center of Gravity'' (1936)

Memory is not a passive filing cabinet, but a continuous process beneath the level of consciousness; in a way, you are always reliving your entire past.

- Poul Anderson, ''Journeys End'' (1957)

We live in now. Memory isn't real. The past doesn't exist.Why should we feel anything about the past, or care about it?

- Katherine MacLean, ''The Missing Man'' (1971)

She felt the vengeful animals of memories trying to hold her back.

- Vonda N. McIntyre, ''The Genius Freaks'' (1973)

Memory was only a matter of habit, of training, of handy mnemonic phrases which easily triggered vital information.

- Anne McCaffrey, ''Prelude to a Crystal Song'' (1974)

I'd never spent much time in Nighttown. Nobody there had anything to pay me to remember, and most of them had a lot they paid regularly to forget.

- William Gibson, ''Johnny Mnemonic'' (1981)

My own past had gone down years before, lost with all hands, no trace. I understood Fox's late-night habit of emptying his wallet, shuffling through his identification. He'd lay the pieces out in different patterns, rearrange them, wait for a picture to form. I knew what he was looking for. You did the same thing with your childhoods. In New Rose, tonight, I choose from your deck of pasts.

- William Gibson, ''New Rose Hotel'' (1984)

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out.We want to believe it was all like that.

- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986)

One side effect of an overzealous memory was a restless need to escape.

- Sheila Finch, ''Reichs-Peace'' (1986)

Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.

- William Gibson, Count Zero (1986)

Professor Urban Chronotis [. . .] had a memory that he himself had once compared to the Queen Alexandra Birdwing Butterfly, in that it was colorful, flitted prettily hither and thither, and was now, alas, almost completely extinct.

- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)

The sheer weight of memory reached some critical mass. [. . .] The burden and bulk of all those minute sensations over days and years and decades, triggering chemical changes in the brain which in turn trigger cellular changes, until the body cannot bear any more and breakdown accelerates. The cut-off point. It is our memories that kill us.

- Nancy Kress, ''In Memoriam'' (1988)

Their voices brought up memories like nets filled with coelacanths.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)

Suddenly he was afraid; they were their pasts, they had to be or they were nothing at all, and whatever they felt or thought or said in the present was nothing more than an echo of the past.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

- Terry Pratchett, Soul Music (1994)

We live forever, we transform ourselves, we transform worlds, solar systems, we ship across interstellar space, we defy time and deny death, but the one thing we cannot recreate is memory, he thought.

- Ian MacDonald, ''The Days of Solomon Gursky'' (1998)