On King Charles II’s memory.
A Character of King Charles II (1750)
“It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.”
Natural Philosophy of Time (1980) as quoted by Suk-Jun Kim, "Time felt and places imagined in my compositions" (2011)
Context: Although the peculiarly fundamental nature of time in relation to ourselves is evident as soon as we reflect that our judgments concerning time and events in time appear themselves to be 'in' time, whereas our judgments concerning space do not appear themselves in any obvious sense to be in space, physicists have been influenced far more profoundly by the fact that space seems to be presented to us all of a piece, whereas time comes to us only bit by bit. The past must be recalled by the dubious aid of memory, the future is hidden from us, and only the present is directly experienced. This striking dissimilarity between space and time has nowhere had a greater influence than in physical science based on the concept of measurement. Free mobility in space leads to the idea of the transportable unit length and the rigid measuring rod. The absence of free mobility in time makes it much more difficult for us to be sure that a process takes the same time whenever it is repeated.
Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 12
Context: Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through, is now like something from the distant past. We're so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like ancient stars that have burned out, are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. New styles, new information, new technology, new terminology... But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone. And for me, what happened in the woods that day is one of these.
“The loss of historical memory is restored in the very place where one has lost it.”
[Chouldjian, Bishop Sebouh, w:Sebouh Chouldjian, A bishops' pilgrimage to Western Armenia, The Armenian Reporter, 2009-12-12, http://www.reporter.am/go/article/2009-12-12-a-bishops--pilgrimage-to-western-armenia, 2010-06-16]
Other
“Reality, it cannot be repeated too often, varies with every one of us.”
Source: Pène du Bois, Henri (1897). Witty, Wise and Wicked Maxims https://archive.org/stream/wittywisewickedm00peneiala#page/n3/mode/2up, New York: Brentano's, p. 88.
“On the Spirit of America” http://books.google.com/books?id=w0IOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA122, Address to Daughters of the American Revoltion (11 October 1915)
1910s
“Very often the things we most desire come only after much patience and struggle.”
Source: Succubus Blues
“The things that go wrong often make the best memories.”
Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
