Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.

Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?

Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

What makes things memorable is that they are meaningful, significant, colorful.

The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.

To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

...who we are and what we do it is fundamentally a function of what we remember.

As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction.

Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

Seeing a miracle will inspire you, but knowing you are a miracle will change you.

Concepts are not real things

But I did have two months off between Loser and the start of Prozac Nation. So, it was supposed to be Jason time, right? My time to enjoy myself away from movies.

Piece by piece living is hard to do. It may even feel like the hardest thing. But it has this going for it: you never need to know what it is you're carrying on your shoulders.

I can't be happy every day but I can be cheerful.

A young woman hiking alone in the mountains sounds dangerous. In the pre-cell phone era maybe it was, but Ill stop short of calling it foolish.

You don't have to go where you don't want to be to get where you want to be. You can go from where you are to where you want to be.

Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

The length and breath of our influence on others are directly related to the depth of our concern for them.

When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.