Quotes About Memory

People do not connect with what happened last week, let alone what happened 20 years ago.

I think we really forget how connected we are to the past.

I've never really worked out this thought, and I don't know if I'm really conscious of it, but I can see there's an attraction about writing about a period that's over and isn't going to change colour while you look at it.

I remember rather little of my life, and what I do remember is of small consequence.

The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.

This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.

I have a hot memory, but I know I've forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

While the hippocampus itself doesn't store memories, it serves to triage our experiences based upon their survival significance.

The good thing that may yet happen during dying is not the possibility of survival when we're beyond that point. The good thing that may yet happen is that our lives will have great meaning for those we leave behind.

To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills.

I am what survives of me.

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

You cannot survive if you do not know the past.

It is true that as people, we tend to remember only the positive. With time, the grim details fade away, and as a species we survive on this notion. In our desire to gloss over the undeniable macabre parts of our American history, we forget. That amnesia manifests itself, especially when dealing with the plight of black men.

I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that survived.

My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.

Maybe people will remember me for being a stylist, not a survivor.

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.

My novella, 'The Lucky One,' is inspired in part by my dad and also by a Holocaust survivor I interviewed for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation.

I had been working with a community of survivors who had lost their relatives and were too scared to talk about it.

Susan Rice has as much trouble with her memory as Hillary Clinton.

Every time you recall a memory, you're basically making another copy of it and, at that same point, it is susceptible to new changes and adaptations.

I suspect that a lot of studio executives still think of me as 'what's-his-name'.