Quotes About Memory

She says that I wore some pretty sexy leather pants to that first meeting, but I don't remember.

Papa died when he was 77.

Often I have the impression that I am writing on paper that is already browning in the licks of the flames.

There was one occasion when I was very young - eight years or seven years old - that Jewish businessmen went through the forest, and they were assassinated. And that was for the first time I saw in our paper where there were assassinations in our place.

I have files, I have computer files and, you know, files on paper. But most of it is really in my head. So God help me if anything ever happens to my head!

The only paradise is paradise lost.

When I was 12, I forgot the keys to my parent's apartment. So I simply climbed up seven floors to get in.

Curiosity is as much the parent of attention, as attention is of memory.

I think because I'm not a parent, my most immediate connection to childhood is my memory of my own childhood.

I didn't even realize this at first, but there's almost no central character in any of my 24 books who doesn't have a dead mother or a lost parent.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

The best Paris I know now is in my head.

I was 14. I went to see a production of 'Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,' and when they got to that final song, 'If We Only Have Love,' it was like the top of my head had blown off.

I was haunted by a bear attack that happened in Algonquin Park in 1991. The problem was that I don't believe in ghosts, so that ruled out an exorcism. My other choice was to start writing.

I'll never forget watching my dad perform in a Shakespeare in the Park production of 'Richard III' in New York.

I had to host a comedy show the day after 9/11, and I really knocked it out of the park. But that was before the Internet really took off, so the only people that know are the people who were there.

My father had Parkinson's, though he actually died following a bicycle accident.

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.

I still cherish the memory of walking into the Parliament for the first time.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

My obsessions stay the same - historical memory and historical erasure. I am particularly interested in the Americas and how a history that is rooted in colonialism, the language and iconography of empire, disenfranchisement, the enslavement of peoples, and the way that people were sectioned off because of blood.

We don't live in a particularly attractive world. I don't really remember, except as a small boy, anything but a pretty grim world.

You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly not to lose them to time. To oblivion. But there's always the danger of the opposite happening. Losing the memory of the experience itself to the memory of writing about it.

I know every note in every song, the whole history of it, even parts that were there and are gone.