Quotes About Memory

Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid?

Ever since I was a girl, I have written about one to five pages every day - on napkins, on scrap paper, in notebooks and tablets, on the walls in my room as a teenager, and in orange paint on the cheap white plastic blinds in my room.

Ryan Reynolds was my childhood crush. His name is all over the walls of my room. I actually Photoshopped myself into a picture with him my freshman year of high school.

If I'm riding my bike I just replay the same scenarios over and over in my head, like I haven't had a new mental adventure since high school. So that's what I like about books on tape, so my mind can't wander anywhere.

Very often, as I wander through life, I'll get that old feeling that I've come back from the future, and I'm living in the past. And it's a really horrible feeling.

Is there something we have forgotten? Some precious thing we have lost, wandering in strange lands?

Nobody wants to be nameless. Nobody wanna be forgotten.

If you want someone to miss you, go secretly and spray your fragrance somewhere.

But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.

I stay on the road so much that my fiancee and I were talking the other night about what I wanted her to cook. I told her I don't even remember what a home-cooked meal is.

I didn't really know what I wanted to do, and then I got this call from a casting director in Los Angeles. She remembered me from something years before, and she called my mom wanting me to audition for this thing.

Behavioral psychologists have observed that wanting something has a much stronger emotional impact than the pleasure that comes once you have it, or the memory of having had it.

Actually, when I was young, I believe I met Nicolas Cage. I think I was probably eight, and I remember seeing him at somebody's house - it was an event and he happened to be there. People would ask me if I was his son, because I looked like him at that point, so I do remember feeling some connection and just wanting to say, like, 'Papa!'

I started to write things down, as a very young child, wanting to find a way to remember - to keep close, somehow - moments that made an impression on me.

I think a lot of us can relate to not choosing to face a painful memory, and something that's a painful past, and wanting to pretend like it never happened.

None of us wants to be reminded that dementia is random, relentless, and frighteningly common.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

My father was a little frightening - a huge man, six foot four - and he looked like God. He was always a visitor, as far as I was concerned, because my parents separated when I was nine. We only became friends when he was old and began to shrink. During the war, he was a BBC war correspondent and did some extraordinary broadcasts.

For the first time in your conscious memory; for the first time in fact, since your were a baby; a single tear, full and warm, rolled down your right cheek and you fell into a very deep and entirely dreamless slumber.

My most vivid memory of my father centers on the day he left. It was warm, and my mother was especially short with Rhonda and me that afternoon, which I attributed to the heat. I was oblivious to the mounting hostilities in our basement apartment.

Full Frame is where I had the first showing of my first film, 'Street Fight.' I have a fond memory of pacing around outside the theater, nervously trying to keep from throwing up. It's a magical festival, well curated, with a warm and generous spirit.

One of my clearest, happiest memories is of myself at fourteen, sitting up in bed, being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother because I had a sore throat, and she saying how envious she was that I was reading 'The Catcher in the Rye' for the first time.