Quotes About Memory

I say that I can't make anything up. I think of myself as a collage artist. I'm cutting and pasting memories of my life. And I say, I have to live a life in order to tell a life. I would prefer to tell it because telling you're always in control, you're like God.

When you're 89, dementia develops. I mean, I've told a story onstage, and I'm telling it with a full heart, and I forgot the damn punch line.

My mother tells me I regaled people with stories but I don't remember that. And she disputes the idea that I might be chronically shy. She says I was the most outgoing of all of us.

We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

My mom tells me the first show we saw was 'The Secret Garden,' but I don't remember that.

When I was little, my mom tells me, I used to say things like, 'Mom do you hear the string section? Do you hear the string section?' And she would look at me and say, 'No honey, I don't know what you're talking about.'

Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.

I have never seen a picture of my mother. My mother's family never owned a photograph of her, which tells you everything you need to know about where I'm from and what the world was like for the people who gave me life.

History is about who tells it.

I have an impeccable memory, and I can learn dialogues in any language in 20 minutes, including Telugu and Malayalam.

I so wish my dad was alive to see me do a Hindi film after acting in six Telugu movies. I sometimes imagine him giving me feedback on my work. But I derive strength from knowing he is watching over me.

I am told that I had a bad temper, and remember being banished to the back hall until civility returned.

Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record keepers, forever searching past events for elusive patterns - and forever believing that such patterns are to be found.

Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be settled by the storm.

History my god. An incurable diarrhea of dead immortals.

Whatever happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?

Memories Hello, duck, in yellow cloth stuffed from inside out, little pillow.

Oh stay awhile. sad, sagging flesh and bones gone brittle. Stay in place, aged face, teeth, don't go. Inside and out the flaccid change of bodily parts, mechanics of action, mind's collapsing habits, all echo here in mottled skin, blurred eye, reiterated mumble. Lift to the vacant air some sigh, some sign I'm still inside.

What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often?

Presence remembered is presence still.

I have so fiercely dreamed of youAnd walked so far and spoken of you so,Loved a shade of you so hardThat now I've no more left of you.

I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real. Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make your dear voice come alive again? I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body. For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many days and years, I would surely become a shadow.

The sound of your voice, your radiant looks, Your smell the smell of your hair and many other things will live on inside me.

From time to time, heavier than a meteorite at its journey's end, a boxer's glove falls. The crowd trampled these memories of kisses and embraces underfoot without paying them the deference they deserved. I alone avoided treading on them. Sometimes I even picked one up. It thanked me with a warm embrace. I felt it tremble in my trouser pocket. Its mistress must have trembled just like that in a fleeting moment of love. I walked on.