I do remember, and then when I try to remember, I forget.

I know beginnings, I know endings too,
and life-in-death, and something else
I'd rather not recall just now.

I find relief from the questions only when I concede that I am not obliged to know everything. I remind myself it is sufficient to know what I know, and that what I know, may not always be true.

I must finish what I've started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began.

Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try to bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have mental models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience, both vicarious and direct, on this latticework of models.

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

Sometimes I think I understand everything — then I regain consciousness.

When you draw on a memory, you always do so from the perspective of your present self. Psychologists call memory a “reconstruction,” because it is always reconstructed based on your present views, which influence how you see and perceive past events.14,15,16 As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., stated, “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you've got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how.

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes much sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.

But in this notebook I would reconstruct the story I had begun, the story I kept beginning, until I had a story.

I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.

In my line of work, it’s all about putting together many apparently unconnected things. When you piece them together the right way, you get the truth