Quotes About Memory

The notion that you have to hold something in your head seems to have been forgotten. It is an absurdity that children learn to investigate topics without having dates in their heads, or the facts.

Well, they didn't lack for topics after Hiroshima. Why should 9/11 slow them down? I know it got a lot of press, but it's just a few large buildings and aircraft, it's not like D-Day and the Seige of Berlin.

The stories that I tell, the topics that I choose to write about, usually are suggested by something that I've done before.

The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity.

The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn - words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for.

I know I will never wear sandals now anywhere. I got in a fight in the back of a grocery store when I was really young, like 14 or something. And I remember my feet were so torn up afterwards because I lost my sandals in the middle of the fight. My toenail was missing. It just sucked.

I don't give a toss about being remembered after my death.

I remember tearing up the first time I read Nabokov's description, in 'Speak, Memory,' of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering muzhiks, with its astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning.

Writing on a computer makes saving what's been written too easy. Pretentious lead sentences are kept, not tossed. Instead of sitting surrounded by crumpled paper, the computerized writer has his mistakes neatly stored in digital memory.

My very first memory of being alive is being tossed in the air by my father and laughing and knowing, really knowing, that his was absolute joy.

Everyone is the sum total of past experiences. A character doesn't just spring to life at age thirty.

Maybe I am naive, but I don't think talking about the Holocaust with total and complete cynicism is possible for Israeli politicians. It's inevitable that the Holocaust is part of Israeli politics.

I don't remember much of my childhood. My father passed away when I was six, and sadly, I don't have the fuzziest, foggiest memory of him - what his voice was like, anything he ever said to me, nothing. My early years are a total blur.

I don't think I've ever played the Olympia before, but I'm not totally sure.

My mother is a huge fan of my work. I told her about 'Coraline' long before the film was made, and she got the book and read it. She reminded me that when I was about five years old, I used to sit in the kitchen for hours and talk about my 'other' family in Africa, my other mother and father. I had totally forgotten that.

The pain was a houseguest you never invited, who doesn't know when to leave and insists on retelling the story of how you met, over and over. A trip down a specific memory lane that I'd just as soon never take again.

Not that it mattered. The people who were dead were still dead.

According to my best recollection, I don't remember.

I haven't lost my mind... it's backed up on disk somewhere.

He noticed Miss Bettie was wearing a watch, a steel Rolex with diamond chips. "What time is it?" he asked. Miss Bettie glanced at him and laughed. "You do seem to have difficulty remembering, don't you? Well, then, I shall tell you. It's now , Joshua Cane. Always and only now.

I assume you know me from somewhere," he said. "Did I ruin your sister's reputation? If so, I'm afraid she was quite forgettable.

I am dwelling on things I love, even if a measure of tragedy is stitched into everything, if you follow the thread long enough

And be thinking, remembering. Trying to. All difficult dark stuff, stories stuffed away, like old socks into old pillowcases. Not quite knowing the weight of truth in them much more. And things that I have let be a long time in the interests of happiness, or at least that daily contentment that I was once I do believe mistress of

The years return us gradually to the afflictions and shames of childhood, it is a curiosity of existence.