Quotes About Memory

Dimly--at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream--she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as as landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past.

It was often difficult to tell if things were a hundred years old, or a hundred thousand.

Better to live in the ruins of empire, I thought, and stand a hope of being remembered, than to be lost in those golden multitudes.

Sluka shook her head. "We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.

It was better to live; better to carry a memory of a memory, than suffer the vast burden of knowing. He was not meant to think like a god.

When you recall something - this conversation, perhaps, a hundred years from now - there will be things about it that you misremember. Yet those misremembered details will themselves become part of your memory, gaining solidity and texture with each instance of recall. A thousand years from now, your memory of this conversation might bear little resemblance to reality. Yet you'd swear your recollection was accurate.

Memory is the personal journalism of the soul.

One of my favorites is one called 'Rory's Radio' that I wrote about my brother Jeff's best friend growing up - his name was Rory Dunigan. I dedicated my first record to my brother, who got killed in a car accident in 1999, and I really didn't have any songs on the first album about him, nothing on a personal note.

Raul Reyes was a good revolutionary. I knew him personally.

I try personally not to be nostalgic.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

The problem as you get older is, from my perspective, after a certain amount of songs, you tend to start writing something and then you stop and say, 'Wait, I think I've written that before.'

I'm not particularly fond of Shoah jokes, yet there is one I cannot forget: Why was Auschwitz an optimistic place? Because all the pessimists were already in New York by then.

I heard about the Holocaust before hearing the 'Cinderella' story or watching 'Peter Pan.'

The school I went to was only famous for one thing... Peter Osgood went to that particular school. That's probably my earliest memory of the importance of football.

The first time I went to the cinema was with my father. He was a huge fan of Peter Ustinov, so we went to see 'Death on the Nile' at the Hampstead Ionic.

I went through a phase where I thought nostalgia was a bad thing.

I grew up using maps and having a sense of direction, and now I have a phone. I used to try to remember numbers, and now I... can just call them up instantly. And that's great. But what's happening right now is that we're in a phase of human evolution where we're merging with machines.

A novelist's lack of awareness of and critical distance to his own body of work is due to a phenomenon that I have noticed in myself and many others: as soon as it is written, every new book erases the last one, leaving me with the impression that I have forgotten it.

I hear my voice and I cringe, I kind of hear Philadelphia in there, my hometown.

People have no memory of phone numbers now because of the cell phone - their address book is in a cell phone.

I like to remember phone numbers because it keeps your brain active. If you don't use it, you lose it.

I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street I grew up on.

Dad was wiped from our lives. The day after he died, every photo of him disappeared from the house. It was as if he'd never existed. Me and my brothers weren't even allowed to go to his funeral. His death was made absolute.