Quotes About Memory

We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.

It's a weakness of mine to forget what it is I've just been talking about so that when people make witty allusions to it, I stare at them open-mouthed, not knowing what they're talking about.

Blame it on our short memories, the daily grind of the 24-hour-news cycle, or the endless barrage of information that comes at us on social media, but count me in the number of people who did not truly understand how utterly gross both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton have been to women, including their own wives, across the years.

My mum took me to see 'The Wizard of Oz' when I was about three and I was blown away.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

I woke up one time coming out of a blackout, and I was on an airplane, descending to land in Charles de Gaulle Airport in France. And all I can think is I must have decided it was a good idea to go to France, and got my passport, and got on a plane.

I used to live in an old historic shipyard town called Trenton, Michigan, and a month after I moved in, I started hearing this woman screaming my full name at three in the morning, every night. Finally, on the seventh or eighth night, she screamed it again, and I woke up.

I'm trying to go over my lines. I woke up on the floor, somebody had me in their arms. I didn't quite know who, people looked so unfamiliar. That's about all I remember.

One morning I woke up and was plunged into psychological shock. I had forgotten I was free.

When I was 4 years old, I woke up in the middle of the night and told my parents there was a witch crying outside in the boxwood bushes. I didn't know who she was or why she was crying, but I was terribly upset.

I woke up in Australia almost every day for the first 47 years of my life. When I left, I didn't discard that, didn't reject that, didn't forget that. Not even New York City can wipe that out.

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

My mom has a tape from when I was, like, 2 years old, talking with my grandma, telling her a story that's really elaborate about werewolves and wolves.

A fragrance that matches the personality of the man or woman who wears it is an integral part of the memory that you have of him or her. It goes without saying that it's a formidable weapon of seduction.

When I was 12 years old, I went to Natchitoches, La.; it was summer vacation with my family. We visited a plantation, Melrose. And I met an Afro-American woman who was a painter. I already had some idea of what I wanted to do in life, and one of the things that interested me was painting.

I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.

I no longer remember when I started speaking to Raffi in Russian. I didn't speak to him in Russian when he was in his mother's womb, though I've since learned that this is when babies first start recognizing sound patterns.

I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.

Rhyme is a mnemonic device, an aid to the memory. And some poems are themselves mnemonics, that is to say, the whole purpose of the poem is to enable us to remember some information.

Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.

The amount of detailed information which an individual has at his command and his theoretical elaborations of the same are mutually dependent; they grow in and through each other.

If Darwin's theories are true, then we have within us the physical memory of when we were fish or apes.