Quotes About Memory

Even though I was away from the public eye, I was in the public memory.

Not long before my mother died, I found a long-lost portrait of Jane Franklin's granddaughter, Jane Flagg, aged nine - oil on canvas - in the basement of a public library not a dozen miles from my mother's house.

Negative publicity makes people forget your best times.

I will say I remember the best thing in terms of publicity was being on the cover of Newsweek.

An army took on the Union; an army lost. That nation, the Confederate States, lost. And if - that flag - in terms of publicly or state-sponsored things, or local or county or city-sponsored things - should be forever wiped from the memory, because that side lost.

One of these days, I'm going to publish a book of all the pictures I did not take. It is going to be a huge hit.

One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.

In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.

When did I learn the Bible? When I was four or five years old. It's still the pull of my childhood, a fascination with the vanished world, and I can find everything except that world.

Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.

I went to see my mother the other day, and she told me this story that I'd completely forgotten about how, when we were driving together, she would pull the car over, and by the time she had gotten out of the car, and gone around the car to let me out of the car, I would have already gotten out of the car and pretended to have died.

I used to dig around the sandbox and pull out pieces of coal and show them to my mother, and she used to say that's how I must have known I was going to be a geologist.

I don't know if I have a memory of not thinking I was a writer - it goes that far back. I went to law school because I didn't know how to earn a living otherwise. I tried to ignore the pull, but it wouldn't let me.

I moved around a lot when I was a child; two of the houses I grew up in have totally disappeared. One was burnt in a riot, and the other was pulled down.

For 'American Born Chinese,' my first graphic novel with First Second Books, I did mostly 'memory' research. It's fiction, but I pulled heavily from my own childhood.

On some level, every story draws something from life experiences. Most of the time, it's just a matter of me pulling bits and pieces of my own past to help give characters or settings a little more life.

Seth Green, he and I are trying to figure out how this all came about. Because we don't remember what came first, the chicken or the egg, no pun intended. But I don't remember what came first, 'Robot Chicken' or our friendship, because we've known each other for so long.

I forget stuff. Guess I took a few too many punches.

I get an awful lot of people coming up and saying they went to school with me. There must have been 80,000 pupils at that school!

Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.

I think, especially with my parents, I wanted to remember who they were. I wanted to remember all of it. I didn't want to purge myself of it. I wanted to remember it.

But I'll tell you what I'm really bad at: I don't concentrate on what I'm doing, so I constantly lose things. I put my purse in the fridge - I'm one of those people.

My grandmother passed away before I could get to know her. She had an interest in films and writing. She wrote two novels under a pen name and encouraged women around her to pursue their dreams. So my family decided to start a school in her memory.