Quotes About Memory

Shanghai, the city where I was born and spent my first four and a half years. It's not necessarily the most pleasant or most comforting place, but I have blood memory there, my core was formed there, so I need to go back often, or else I become empty, lost, without meaning.

I can't remember a dish my mother made that to me was pleasant. To this day I have a phobia of instant noodles.

I think I've had a certain amount of success at making phrases. I'm a good writer. But obviously, I'm incredibly flattered and pleased when people remember things that I say.

The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.

Wouldn't you like to have an augmented memory chip that you could plug into your head so you don't have to look everything up and remember everything?

My daddy had a pocket watch that he wore at all times in court. I gave Greg the watch and showed him how Daddy used to use it.

Cross-body bags are my favorite, because if something isn't across my body or in a pocket, I'll put it down and forget it forever.

I've always kept a notebook in my pocket, I've always written stuff down since I was a kid.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

When I was a kid, a pickleball hit me in the back of the head, and I had memory problems. I was in a boarding school and the nuns gave me poems to remember to try and get the memory going again.

It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.

I've been interested in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's work for quite a while. My first introduction to LeRoi Jones was when my mother used to read me the 'Dead Lecturer' poems when I was a kid.

I had written here and there about my mother in my poems. There are poems for her in my first and second books.

Paul Lisicky, in his new memoir, 'The Narrow Door,' describes losing his old friend, the novelist Denise Gess, and his husband, the acclaimed poet and memoirist Mark Doty, within a year of each other: Gess to cancer, at the age of 57, and Doty to another man.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

Everyone has ways of trying to find a way to memorise our past. There's something very poetic about that.

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

I seem to be always returning to photography in my poetry. I guess you could say that I'm documenting the personal history and relationship I have with photography.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.

Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it.

Memoir is a difficult literary form to pull off when dealing with discrete and poignant moments in a life, even harder when seeking to narrate over 80 years of existence.

Everything about 'Hugo' to me is poignant, from the broken orphan to the old man losing his past to the fragility of film itself.

I think that's the greatest gift one can have: point of view. You know? I've come to believe that if you have a bad memory of something, change it.