Quotes About Memory

Play Trivial Pursuit with me, and you'll be astonished. I can remember every outfit I wore to every party going back to 1983.

Why is it that I can remember so easily the lyrics to the opening theme song of 'Gilligan's Island?' Why do I remember these trivial things, and I can't remember the names of important collaborators?

I can remember when President Nixon basically said, 'All troops have been withdrawn from the delta.' And I said, 'Wait, I'm still here.'

The biggest memory I have is the 1984 European Cup final against Roma and my 'spaghetti legs' routine during the penalty shoot-out that won us the trophy. People said I was being disrespectful to their players, but I was just testing their concentration under pressure. I guess they failed that test.

Acknowledging your mistakes also has its pluses, but we often don't have trouble recalling or mulling over those. The point is, if you don't acknowledge your successes the same way you acknowledge your mistakes, you're sure to have a memory full of blunders.

My wife is troubled by the things I forget. I am troubled by the things she recollects.

I have a fondness for writing about precocious, troubled teenagers, who are alienating, but kind of endearing. It's from remembering so clearly that time in my own life. I experienced myself as more dramatically troubled than I was, but I just remember how it felt.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

I know a lot of people who are not here anymore, and I wonder why I'm still here... Not a day goes by that I don't think about Sam Cooke. His presence is so strong and so convincing to me, a true artist, a true talent, who never talked down to people.

I'm a true believer in, people only remember you for your last fight.

The true story of how my husband, Stephen, and I exchanged our first 'I love you's' - chronicled in my 2012 memoir 'Brain on Fire' - occurred deep in a hallucinatory psychotic episode outside a crowded Maplewood, NJ, restaurant.

I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.

When I look back at my life and think about what really happened, my memory is obscured by the stories I've created out of those incidents. In stories, as reality melds with art, the result sometimes feels truer than real life.

Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?

Now more than ever, I have learned that, when people die, they truly do live throughout those who love them.

While writing 'City Boy,' I relied mainly on my own memories. In particular, I was able to describe the effect of gay liberation on an individual life (mine) as events paralleled my own growing self-acceptance; in this case, the political truly was the personal.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.

I trust anybody's memory more than I trust mine.

I literally forget everything, and, trust me, that's the best thing that you can have.

There is a beauty in nature and culture that we no longer have access to. Those things you can't forget, you embroider... The further you tell, the further you travel from truth, which means, of course, that literature is a lie.

If we make people believe that before the age of 16 they got sick drinking vodka, they don't want to drink as much vodka.

People who want to appear clever rely on memory. People who want to get things done make lists.

I think a lot of people want to be remembered the way they were, as opposed to the way they are now.