Quotes About Memory

There's a couple of movie parts that I can't remember. There was always something kind of lurking, because when 'The Office' started, I wasn't a regular. You're a guest star, so they don't really need you. They didn't say that, but I've seen the show - with or without me, it's still funny.

When I first retired, I had short-term memory loss, and I started reading about neuroplasticity in the brain, about how the brain can regenerate itself, and I don't know if it can or not.

When I started reading George R.R. Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire' novels, it was the late 1990s and obsessing over fantasy novels was (if painful memory serves) a super-nerdy thing to do.

If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write - and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy - I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war.

By the time the discussion starts about a movie, it's like bringing up an old boyfriend. It's like, 'I don't even remember exactly what he was like, and now we have to talk about it?'

Ireland starts for me with the end of 'The Dead,' which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.

I think life after death is in the mind of the people around you. It's what's left in this world in the memory of others, but when the flesh starts rotting, the spirit disappears.

Our brain starts a long degenerative arc beginning around age 40.

The theatre starts every night at half past seven, and I like the rhythm of going to the theatre, parking the car, going to the stage door; I've grown up with all of that. I'd love to do more theatre - I mean, I shouldn't be telling the world that I can't remember lines any more, but I find it more and more difficult, so I don't know.

With a lot of songs, songs that don't make a good statement, I forget the words.

I have made many serious statements - I just can't remember any of them. I guess they mustn't have been very important.

Mental states of every kind, - sensations, feelings, ideas, - which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist.

I don't view my memory as accurate or static - and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality - so 'autobiographical,' to me, is closer in meaning to 'fiction' than 'autobiography.'

Memory runs by its own itinerary, departing and arriving at stations of the past on its own schedule.

Did you see the statue topple? Bill Clinton got nostalgic seeing something that big in a beret go down.

The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.

Characters can stay with you.

When I see friends from school I think they've all grown old and I've stayed the same.

The results would have stayed on the watch face until the batteries died. But trying to make time stand still this way would have been a mistake. It is just as important to erase times eventually as to save them at first.

I was 8 years old when I went across the street from my house to a fair, and they always had a used book sale. For a quarter I bought a book called 'Come On Seabiscuit.' I loved that book. It stayed with me all those years.

It alarms me to think of all that I have read and how little of it has stayed with me.

For 20 years, my mother, my sister and I had seldom spoken of my father. If he happened to come up in conversation, pain and embarrassment entered the room and stayed until he disappeared back into the silence with which we all felt more at ease.

I really started to forget things. That's why I quit reciting statistics: because I couldn't remember them exactly, and I stayed away from mentioning some players by name because I really wasn't sure, and I didn't want to make a mistake.

'The Danish Girl' was published in 2000. Then it, too, would disappear, as most books do. It fell out of print almost everywhere. I wrote other books and, as an editor, worked on dozens more. Yet always, Lili stayed with me.