Memory Quotes
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I have a very vivid memory of the way my parents spoke, and the 50's that I grew up in are closer to the 20's, I think, than today in many, many ways.
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I'm a writer who simply can't know what I'm writing about until the writing lets me discover it. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains.
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The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory.
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I think one of the primary themes in my work is the paradox of memory, at once fundamental to our sense of who we are and yet elusive, ever-changing, fragmentary. One way to look at this is to say that, therefore, we ourselves are elusive, ever-changing and fragmentary to ourselves.
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Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.
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But what of life whose bitter hungry sea Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night Covers the days which never more return? Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory.
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In my novels, there are twelve ancient 'memory tools,' all now lost. Each of the 'Reincarnationist' books revolves around a different tool.
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Anger is a memory never forgotten. You only tame it.
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Memory is a way of telling you what's important to you.
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It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.
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I could walk into anyone's home one time and draw a three-dimensional architectural plan of the inside of their home from memory, but I could not add up a column of numbers.
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I had this image stuck in my mind. I was four and I was walking down the street, holding my brother’s hand. I wondered if it was a memory or a dream. Or a hope.
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Three thousand people died at ground zero. Their families are entitled to a little bit of respect, to respect the memory of those poor people that died there. And how about the families of all those soldiers that died in the two ensuing wars? Aren't they entitled to a little bit of respect - the kids, the wives, the parents?
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What happens so often as an actor is that you retain the information about the scenes that you yourself shot and you obsess over certain scenes that you found the most challenging or interesting. The rest of the film kind of falls away in your memory or it fades a little bit.
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We did not have a television while I was growing up, and so I read voraciously. My earliest memory of being utterly transfixed by a book was Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time.'
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People don't realize that now is all there ever is; there is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind.
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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
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Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.
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It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.
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The one thing that did stand out in my memory was the fact that he had a well documented association with Heroin. Growing up with a somewhat myopic view of the world, I could not understand how it was that people could put a drug user on such a high pedestal (If you will pardon the pun).
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The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
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To my mind, it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder.
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Literature is memory written down. All literature is memory.
