Quotes About Memory

I'm very detail oriented. I think that's why people enjoy my memoirs - because I tend to remember everything.

I originally got very interested in memory in high school when my grandmother came to live with us. She had been diagnosed with dementia. It was the first time I had heard the word 'Alzheimer's disease.'

I went to an Orthodox Jewish children's home that became an orphanage.

I once kissed a boy at my first job because he offered to record the Oscars for me.

I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.

From the time we open our eyes, we live in a Steadicam form, and the only editing is when we talk about our lives or remember things.

People can forget your music but we are more surprised than happy to see that no one has forgotten our music.

Justice Ginsburg is a shining example of how one person can impact our world and truly make a difference. May her memory be a blessing.

It's a really important thing for Aboriginal people to remember how stories are told and the power of stories, and make it an important feature in our world again.

I can remember every outfit I wore to every party going back to 1983.

If what you create does not outlive you, then you have failed.

Sometimes a famous subject may even outlive his own obituary writer.

Ultimately, what I want is for my songs to outlive me: I want my songs to keep being played even after I'm gone.

I have an obsession with mortality. I saw a friend die when I was 18, and I can't get over it.

I was scarred in 1977 by watching Jaws, and I've never got over it.

Luckily, I'm only aware of about two or three concussions that I have had, but there's really no way of telling how many overall.

You don't just forget things overnight.

I was so overwhelmed years ago, when I was a kid, by 'All Quiet on the Western Front.' I think it was the second movie I ever saw. I never got over that one.

He looked out across the field. He seemed to have forgotten where he was, and for a while Larry rocked, bats fluttering over his view and crickets chirping in the monkey grass along the edge of the porch and his mother's wind chime jingling, delicate notes too tender to be metal, more like soft bone on wire; he'd always thought the chime sounded like a skeleton playing a guitar, and for a time they sat together on the porch and watched the sun scald the sky red and the trees black.

Just this morning, out of a large memory for songs, and having been obsessed by them since childhood, suddenly, at the age of 84, I thought of a song I hadn't thought of in over 50 years. It came into my head unbidden.

So much history buried underneath. We spend our lives to try to dig it out, but always the present buries it again.

Only to say that the myths survive when everything else has been forgotten. And that sometimes the myths, for all their slippery deceptions, tell us more about the past than ruined walls and broken pots.

I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?'

I feel connected to the Second World War because my father lost his father in that war. So, through my dad and the effect it had on him of losing his father young, I always felt connected to the war. It goes back years, but it still feels to me as if we're completely living in it.