The Memory Palace Quotes

“He [Nicolaus Steno] told the audience, "Beautiful is what we see. More beautiful is what we understand. Most beautiful is what we do not comprehend.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“We children of schizophrenics are the great secret keepers, the ones who don't want you to think that anything is wrong.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“Children of the mentally ill learn early on how not to be a bother, especially if they grew up with neglect. As my sister insisted once, when she was in severe pain after injuring her ankle, 'This isn't me! This is not who I am!”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“We humans are different - our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them, our recollections in their retelling.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“Beautiful is what we see. More beautiful is what we understand. Most beautiful is what we do comprehend.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“We humans are different--our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them. Our recollections change in their retelling.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel says we are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember. Who am I, then, if my memory is impaired?”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“I felt held hostage by her illness and by the backward mental health system that once again was incapable of helping our family in crisis.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“I don't want to be the person who gasps in fear whenever she hears the sound of a doorbell or a phone. I just want to lose myself in these hills, in the river winding west to the city of bridges.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“Memory, if it is anything at all, is unreliable.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“At the bottom of the box were two big fairy-tale collections our father had sent us sometime after our parents divorced in 1963. I was four and my sister was five. We never saw him again. One book was a beautifully illustrated collection of Russian fairy tales inscribed, "To Rachel, from Daddy." The other, a book of Japanese fables, was inscribed to me. It had been years since I had opened them. I stared at the handwriting. Something seemed a bit off. Then it dawned on me - both inscriptions bore my own adolescent scrawl. I had always remembered the books and our father's dedications as proof of his love for us. Yet, how malleable our memories are, even if our brains are intact. Neuroscientists now suggest that while the core meaning of a long-term memory remains, the memory transforms each time we attempt to retrieve it. In fact, anatomical changes occur in the brain every single time we remember. As Proust said, "The only paradise is paradise lost.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“What will life be like without her? I am dreadfully sad she is leaving. What if she just disappears; gets tired of all this trouble at home? What if she leaves me too? How heavy is a dresser when you're the only one pushing it against the door? I feel truly on my own.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“And then the grandfather of geology, Nicolaus Steno’s words come back to me once again: “Beautiful is what we see. More beautiful is what we understand. Most beautiful is what we do not comprehend.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“Neuroscientists now suggest that while the core meaning of a long-term memory remains, the memory transforms each time we attempt to retrieve it. In fact, anatomical changes occur in the brain every single time we remember. As Proust said, “The only paradise is paradise lost.” As”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“and chicken bones for fossilized remains. A lifetime later I am building a world inside my head: I run down narrow staircases, dark halls and passageways, chased by the fear of forgetting. Inside a room is a diorama from deep time, when dinosaurs ruled the earth. In 1969, the year our mother’s younger cousin, Philip, shipped out for Vietnam, and our father stopped sending us child support, I turned ten years”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace