Quotes About Memory

Los Angeles is an uncanny place to live. It has many science fiction qualities. For example, when I'm standing in line at the supermarket and I recognise the person in front of me, but I can't figure out how I know them. Suddenly, I realise I saw them in some random commercial six years ago.

Even the slightest deja vu are supernatural incidents.

Americans who grew up in the 1930s or 1940s still have some fleeting memory of what the country was like before it became the steroidal superpower it is today.

Incongruous information is discarded, and supporting information is eagerly retained. Our memory actually ends up skewed: we are better able to process and recall the facts that we are motivated to process and recall, while conveniently forgetting those that we would prefer weren't true.

A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness.

Ever since I was a child, I've kept boxes and drawers and pages of things that I liked. I suppose that it constitutes a journal of sorts, but it's not in a ledger or a notebook.

Anyone who has lost a child will tell you that they don't recover their sense of endless possibility. Some people hide that well. But after a certain age, almost everyone is carrying something like that around, I suppose.

You're supposed to remember, and still forgive.

For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past.

A good memory is surely a compost heap that converts experience to wisdom, creativity, or dottiness; not that these things are of much earthly value, but at least they may keep you amused when the world is keeping you locked away or shutting you out.

What I learned on 'To Die For,' I learned over the years that followed, when some memory from the shoot would bubble up to the surface of my mind, and I could see it from a new perspective. I would usually cringe when that happened.

The German mass murder of the Jews... brought my Jewishness to the surface.

My fat cells have a memory like Einstein! I'm proof that surgery is not a magic potion. There are many ways to sabotage it.

I'm good at forgetting auditions, and then there is a surprise to getting something.

I was an altar boy and heard the Bible being read out repeatedly. The stories have stayed with me, although they're completely remixed in my head. And often, when I do further reading, I'm quite surprised by the difference between the real story and my memory of the story.

I'm always surprised at how many people remember me from 'Degrassi.'

I can't remember how many years it's been since I last saw a David Parsons program or what I saw whenever it was, but that isn't surprising, since I can't really remember the first half of a David Parsons program while I'm watching the second half.

In some ways, the finding that financial education doesn't provide long-term payoffs is hardly surprising. After all, how much do you remember from your high school chemistry class? Unless you use chemistry at work, you probably don't recall much about ionic bonding.

The most surprising thing I discovered was how rich of a life I've led. It's easy to forget all the things we experience throughout our human journey.

Often times I'm confronted with a quote that I don't remember saying. So, on one hand it's very flattering, it is just so surreal.

I look upon 'A Little Bit of Luck' as a very bizarre, happy, surreal memory.

'Friends' and 'Cold Feet' seem like a lifetime ago. That whole period is like a weird, bizarre blip or a surreal dream.

I wanted James Carville to never die. I wanted Dylan, the poet, to not die. I wanted to put these people in a place where they would be inviolate. It wasn't enough to have a still life of them. I wanted to surround them with the lives they led.

And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, is that if something happened to one of us--excuse me for saying this--but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory.