Quotes About Memory

I tend to write about towns because that's what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel.

I often think that could we creep behind the actor's eyes, we would find an attic of forgotten toys and a copy of the Domesday Book.

Most of the moments of our life - and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 - most of them don't leave a trace.

That, for me, is the only real legacy: the idea that one has left a lingering trace in people's memories. In the end, that's all a director can hope to do.

I think that's what we're all most terrified about: that we'll just die and disappear and we'll leave no trace.

I have a photograph of myself when I was 2 years of age, and I don't recognize the person in the photograph. She doesn't look anything like me, and I can't find any trace of her in me physically. And yet I remember her very, very well - even her anxiety.

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.

The American Revolution as it actually unfolded was so troubling and strange that once the struggle was over, a generation did its best to remove all traces of the truth.

I remember a nightfall from childhood, far from home and off the known track: I'd been walking with some older boys, but they ran off and left me, and as darkness hurried in, I suddenly realised how far from home I was.

Bad things happen. And the human brain is especially adept at making sure that we keep track of these events. This is an adaptive mechanism important for survival.

I go onstage and I talk, and I remember what I'm saying, and I track it.

He hasn't said whether he remembers the episode itself - or, if he doesn't, whether that is because it never happened or because it happened too often to keep track. More important, he hasn't said what he thinks about it all from the perspective of 2003.

I can't keep track of my hospital time. It all sort of blurs together.

For me, I'm just too bad at remembering the details of lengths of parts of songs, so if we had backing tracks, it would be a recipe for disaster.

The first thing I remember hearing was just the dance music that was in the charts when I was growing up. I don't remember many of the names of specific tracks - they were just kind of early acid house things.

Trading demands total concentration and the ability to do several things at once while instantly recalling trading prices from the day, or week, before.

I have this memory of being 15 years old, sitting with a friend on the steps of a little bookstore on Bloor Street in Toronto and saying, 'I'll never take money for my writing!' I had such idealism about this idea of trading your soul for money.

At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.

We will not return No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz

Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.

When my family all got together, I'd always get up and entertain everyone, but it was all a bit of a joke. My first real memory of singing for people was when I was about eleven or 12.

They forgot everything the minute they were together again.

Every loss which we incur leaves behind it vexation in the memory, save the greatest loss of all, that is, death, which annihilates the memory, together with life.

Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us.