memory

- Retaining and recalling past experience; recollection or remembrance. All that a person can remember, or something remembered. The period of time covered by the remembrance or recollection of a person or group of people. Also, the capacity of a material, such as plastic or metal, to return to a previous shape after manipulation. The study of memory, or the use of tricks to remembering is called mnemonics after the Greek goddess Mnemosyne, who was considered the mother of the nine muses. Both remembering and forgetting are crucial to the creative process.

• "The true art of memory is the art of attention."
  Samuel Johnson (1709-84), English author, lexicographer. The Idler, number 74, in Universal Chronicle (London, Sept. 15, 1759; reprinted in Works of Samuel Johnson, volume 2, edited by W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt and L. F. Powell, 1963). See attention.
  
  
• "If man has one good memory to go by, that may be enough to save him."
  Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), Russian novelist.
  
  
• "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
  George Santayana (1863-1952), Spanish and American philosopher, poet, and novelist. The Life of Reason, 1905-06.
  
  
• "We must smash, demolish, and destroy our traditional harmony, which makes us fall into a gracefulness created by timid and sentimental cubs. We disown the past because we want to forget, and in art to forget means to be renewed."
  Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), Italian Futurist painter and sculptor. Pittura, scultura futuriste, 1914. See sentimental.
  
  
• "There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted."
  Henri Matisse (1869-1954), French artist. Quoted in obituaries reporting his death, Nov. 5, 1954.
  
  
  
• "You can look at a painting for a whole week and then never think about it again. You can also look at a painting for a second and think about it for the rest of your life."
  Joan Miró (1893-1983), in an interview with Yvon Taillandier, 1959.
  
  
• "For me art shouldn't be a fixed idea that I have before I start making it. I want it to include all the fragility and doubt that I go through the day with. Sometimes I'll take a walk just to forget whatever good idea I had that day because I like to go into the studio not having any ideas. I want the insecurity of not knowing, like performers feel before a performance. Everything I can remember, and everything I know, I have probably already done, or somebody else has."
  Robert Rauschenburg (1925-), American artist, quoted by Michael Kimmelman in an article about Rauschenburg, New York Times, "Arts & Leisure" section 2, August 27, 2000, p. 26.
  
  
• "The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. remembering is a form of forgetting."
  Milan Kundera (1929-), Franco-Czech writer, best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
  
  
• "For a long time — at least six decades — photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events, and it now seems probable that the defining association of people everywhere with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib."
  Susan Sontag (1933-2005), American essayist, novelist, left wing intellectual, and activist, "Regarding the Torture of Others," New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2004, p. 25.