Quotes About Memory

Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.

Often, even after years, mental states once present in consciousness return to it with apparent spontaneity and without any act of the will; that is, they are reproduced involuntarily.

Grandma played a taste test game with my sister and me when I was 3 years old. She would blindfold us and have us guess what was on the spoon: the first flavors I got were strawberry - then coffee!

It is no use describing a house; the reader will fix the scene in some spot he knows himself.

As people get older and fall out of the spotlight, people's memory of them changes.

That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.

People tend to group together their favourite sitcoms and feel that they all took place in one spot named 'the past', but in fact all these sitcoms are spread over a long period of time, and all the terrible sitcoms that were on have been justifiably forgotten.

I was 8 years old in the spring of 1945 when my family fled Silesia to escape the Russian army. On our way, we passed through Dresden. A few days later, it was firebombed. The fire was so bright that night that one could read a newspaper from the light, though we were many kilometers away.

In 'Property,' none of the characters are based on any real people, but the house is very much the house that I moved into in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

I just remember playing in my school and then getting invited to go along to train with a development squad at Reading. My first training session, the manager said, 'You have to come and play with the academy girls,' so that would probably be my first footballing memory.

It bothers me that I won't live to see the end of the century, because, when I was young, in St. Louis, I remember saying to Marilyn, my sister by adoption, that that was how long I wanted to live: seventy years.

I was born in St. Louis but lived there just for a few minutes in my life.

If I score a goal in training, it feels great. But in a stadium, especially Anfield, or even when you score away and the fans are silent, it's just amazing. You are just in the moment. There are times when I've scored, and I can't even remember what happened. It's so good.

Most of my nightmares involve me forgetting my lines in a stage play.

I can't remember if I had any stage fright at the first Bowl. But I did the second time.

My father started growing very quiet as Alzheimer's started claiming more of him. The early stages of Alzheimer's are the hardest because that person is aware that they're losing awareness. And I think that that's why my father started growing more and more quiet. I think he felt, 'I don't want to say something wrong.' That's my sense of it.

I dyed my own hair this Chocolate Cherry color, and I forget what brand it was, but I remember getting into so much trouble because it stained our bathtub. It was this red-black color, and it was a big mistake.

I said I thought first I was on the stairs; then I remembered I was in the kitchen when he came in.

I remember as a student going to Covent Garden, where they took out the stall seats and you hunkered down on the floor - I heard Pavarotti in Tosca there, and the experience of being in that same room with that astonishing voice has never left me.

Let me create great music, go in the studio, and possibly become a memory and a time stamp in people's lives - and just give the best performances, because I know that's all that really matters.

You can be chased home or hit or called names or spit on, and it's over. You have the memory of it, but it's very different from the emotional and psychological experience of feeling invisible, of not learning the confidence to stand up in class and speak.

You see, the thing is, if you don't do anything to your face, and you get old, and you can stand up, and you can remember your lines, the work is there.

When a writer dies you get a higher standard of obituary.

My parents have been dead for many years, and when your folks are gone there is nobody standing between you and eternity.