Quotes About Memory

People of my generation did not like very much to tell what we lived through during the Khmer Rouge regime.

The poem builds in my mind and sits there, as if in a register, until the poem, or a piece of a longer poem, is finished enough to write down. I can hold several lines in my head for quite some time, but as soon as they are written down, the register clears, as it were, and I have to work with what is on the paper.

That's one thing I don't want to happen is a regret getting a tat because that bad boy not going away.

I still remember the first time I was on stage. It was for a short play, 'Dilnaz and the Chocolate Cake.' And the only reason why I did it was because we used to rehearse with real chocolate cake.

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.

I feel quite connected to the past, and my memory. Everything that I've ever done I can still relate to, and feel connected to it in a way. There's no part of my life that I look at and go, 'I don't recognize that person at all.'

I still relate to my father very much. I mean, I talk to him in a certain way, as we do talk to the dead.

Everything that I had done creatively related to two or three incidents that happened to me when I was a child that I'd forgotten. Everything, absolutely everything.

I had a very distant relationship with my father. It was always just me and my mother. It was a shattering blow when she died. I was 16.

The new record started out being about loss, but it's morphed into being about how relationships go on even though one person is not in a body anymore.

The retrospective glance is a relatively easy gesture for us to make.

It is relatively impossible for people to have clear perspectives on themselves when they're in the midst of them, and often harder to recollect after the times, eras, and situations themselves have passed.

My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks.

In China, the dead are not forgotten - my relatives cheerfully pointed out all the niches of deceased friends and family, as if gesturing at the homes of the living.

It's easier for me to remember things based on the releases of albums. The year is such an arbitrary thing.

I am not someone who forgets things and changes his way of thinking.

Disinterring famous people has become a kind of sport in the Hispanic world. Before Cervantes, it happened to Evita, Che Guevara, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Pablo Neruda.

I don't have a big thing about leaving my mark or being historic.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

Never, ever forget history.

You can't erase history.

If you forget your history, you forget who you are.

Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history.

I'm a Top 40 record guy. I remember the hits and don't remember the flops. Something in my brain blocks them out.