"A journal is more than a memory goad. It's therapeutic. The act of opening a notebook to put words down stills the crosscurrents of worry, drawing to focus the essential thought patterns that best define us, intersecting those thoughts with the condition of our life at that exact moment. A journal is one of the few anchors the human condition allows us."
"The impact of art touches something buried deep in embodied memory. It is a mystery."
–– Juhani Pallasmaa (b. 1936), Finnish architect
Source: Judy's Journal, Monday November 25, 2024
via: Sketchbook 7/10/1, 2024, p. 18.
"My sketchbooks are my warehouses of memory."
–– Pep Carrió, Spanish book cover designer
Source: Richard Brereton. Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators, and Creatives. London UK: Laurence King Publishing, 2009 (2012), p. 46.
via: Sketchbook N 14, 2024, p. 12.
"It was her father who had taught her that intuition was a gift of memory. Of pieces of past and present experiences melding together to warn the body of things the mind failed to remember. She needed to heed that inner voice."
–– Ausma Zehanat Khan, Canadian-American writer
Source: Ausma Zehanat Khan. Blood Betrayal. New York: Minotaur Books, 2023; p. 198.
via: Aboveground Art Supplies Knapsack Sketchbook 2020, 2024, p. 38.
"Don't look back. There's nothing left for you in Syria.
"It was advice he couldn't have followed. A homeland was a place of the heart, a place of memory and belonging. To lose it, to leave, to watch it dissolve into agony, to be coerced into exile –– it was a severing of self."
–– Ausma Zehanat Khan, Canadian-American writer
Source: Ausma Zehanat Khan. A Dangerous Crossing. New York: Minotaur Books, 2018, p. 324.
via: Commonplace Book 2002, 2024, p. 139.
"Doodling has ... been shown to enhance our ability to track and remember key aspects of otherwise highly tedious tasks. It seems the slight distraction provided by the random swirls and shapes we draw occupies the brain's cognitive-control mechanisms that help us seek engaging activities and try to steer us away from situations that are not rewarding. But the doodling itself does not require a lot of the brain's processing resources, allowing us to take in and encode whatever else is going on without interference from these "I'm bored and need to do something else" mechanisms.
–– Mark Fenske, author and cognitive-neuroscientist and Professor in the department of Psychology at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Source: "Fidget, squirm, doodle –– and think better." The Globe and Mail, Thursday December 1, 2011, p. L6.
via Sketchbook 17, 2011, p. 38
"I am intrigued with combining the remnant of memories, fragments of relics and ordinary objects, with the components of technology. It's a way of delving into the past and reaching into the future simultaneously."
–– Betye Saar (b. 1926), American assemblage artist
"Memory is more than a looking back at a time that is no longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still."
–– Frederick Buechner (b. 1926), American writer and Presbyterian minister
Source: Frederick Buechner. The Sacred Journey. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982; p. 21.
via Book of Commonplace 2005-2006, p.111
