Quotes About Memory

Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through feeling. He does it through texture. It is all physically driven, that language.

My favourite author as a child and teenager, and who I still re-read now, is K. M. Peyton. She writes very truthfully; sometimes I'm not sure if I've actually done things or just experienced them in her books.

The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.

They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.

Most memoir writers will tell you that the hardest part of writing a memoir isn't what to include, but what to leave out.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

When I'm writing, I just kind of put myself in a place, in a certain time period in my life.

When you're writing a screenplay, it's like you're dreaming the film for yourself again and again and again until it becomes almost like a memory before you make it.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory. I like the atmospheres that result if episodes are narrated through the haze of memory.

The odd thing about being a writer is you do tend to lose yourself in your books. Sometimes it seems like real life is flickering by and you're hardly a part of it. You remember the events in your books better than you remember the events that actually took place when you were writing them.

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

You might forget a story, but you can never unhear a story.

In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place.

Happiness now sometimes meant turning away from what one remembered of earlier, better happiness.

You mean you indulged in adultery and you dont' even have the benefit of a good saucy memory about it.

They did the best they could. Besides I was hardly a stranger. I had known your grandmother. We were like this. She twined her second and third fingers together as if they might strangle each other.

You need my help? What for? Bread, cash, a fake identity to help you slip sideways through the cracks? Tell me what you need, tell me why I should help, and I'll see what I can do. In memory of Elphaba. You knew her. Her head titled again, but up, this time, and it was to keep the sudden wetness from spilling into her carefully colored false eyelashes. You knew my Elphie!

But let me remember what I choose.

Only, sometimes, in the text of a book here and there, we tap the page with a finger and say, "This is what my lost days were like. Something like this.

In dreams, time may eddy and distort, but even when it traffics in the past, it does so in the guise of the present moment

You might forget an event but you can never go back to living as you did before it's influence was applied upon you