Quotes About Memory

In some senses Ashoke and Ashima live the lives of the extremely aged, those for whom everyone they once knew and loved is lost, those who survive and are consoled by memory alone. Even those family members who continue to live seem dead somehow, always invisible, impossible to touch. Voices on the phone, occasionally bearing news of births and weddings, send chills down their spines. How could it be, still alive, still talking?

Three times a day, for the next three days, until they've buried my friend's father, until they come back, the dog and I make the same rounds. I grow fond of the animal, of his ears, always alert, and of his careful gait, his determined muzzle.

I watched your father killed before my eyes, she might have said.

My mother, by now, clings to life like a yellowing piece of Scotch tape in a scrapbook. It can detach at any moment, and yet it still does the job. All you need to do is turn the page to unstick it, so that it leaves a pale rectangular stain behind. I'm not impressed by what I've just written, it feels overwrought, but I hold on to the receipt.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

If you train yourself in memory work, you fearlessly attack and rearrange your material, for you can retain your original impression.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

When I'm at work, I'm remembering what I forgot to do for the kids, and when I'm with the kids, I'm remembering what I forgot to do at work.

In fact, sometimes when I look at something my memory does work. I remember the panel where Alex Toth told me, "Mike, if you really don't understand all that, you don't need to put it on there."

My chronology is terrible. [Work with William Shawn] must have some ago. It was after he was fired by Newhouse. After New - when Newhouse bought The New Yorker, he said in one of those grand press

Making work without memory is probably one of my biggest fears. It would be indistinguishable from work that is lazy.

The most vital things in the look of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory; memory of that vital moment.

If you work from memory, you are most likely to put in your real feeling.

Maybe lurking in my unconscious was the idea that when someone's collected poems are published it means that the poet is dead. I found myself looking at my work as if I were at my own funeral.

If something is in my mind, I can easily forget everything else and maybe forget about other people. I'm trying to change it's not that I'm that bad. I want people to want to work with me.

Only two things happen to writers when they die: Either their work survives, or it becomes forgotten.

I kind of felt I left a good message and memory with the people in terms of my work, and I always felt with a good record, I could always come back.

In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.

Every artist takes their final work to the grave.

I don't want to be remembered for my work. I want to be remembered for my love.

You will get your father's wealth one day but not his legacy.

My real name is Bob Davis, but for some reason, I got the name Jasper while playing football at the local rec when I was nine years old, and it just stuck. Years later, when someone asked 'Jasper who?' I just said 'Carrott' - but I have no idea why I came out with that particular word.

For 'Regulate,' I was at home, and I came up with it. I was listening to Michael McDonald's 'I Keep Forgettin'.' It was a record that I always loved, from being a kid and my parents playing it when they had their company of friends over. It was a record that just stuck in my head, and it just felt good.

There are a billion songs that I've heard and said, 'I don't even care to have an opinion about it,' but if I have to hear a snippet of the refrain of 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together' once, it'll get stuck in my head, and that drives me crazy.