Quotes & Sayings About Thinking About Memories

It frightens me that I can't do anything sensible about it."
"Are you scared that you'll wind up with a boring job where you have to see the same people every day and drink instant coffee?"
"I'm more scared that I'll forget the feeling I have now."
"Kind of like how you forgot how it feels to be three years old."
"That surely I'll wind up thinking I was so young, I didn't really understand everything. It bothers me that I know I will be wrong. — Gunnar Ardelius

The hardest bit about losing people you loved wasn't thinking about the memories you had, the ones that had already been made. No. The hardest bit was the stuff that should have been, but had now been denied. — Matt Haig

I think it's always hard for children to talk about abuse because it is only memory. I didn't carry around a tape recorder ... I didn't chisel anything in stone ... Anybody can look and say, 'Well how do you know for sure?' And that's one of the most painful things about it. You don't. — Anne Heche

Just as important as getting enough sleep is thinking about sleep in the right way. Stop thinking of sleep and naps as "downtime" or as a "waste of time." Think of them as opportunities for memory consolidation and enhancing the brain circuits that help skill learning. Nor should you feel guilty about sleep. It's just as crucial a part of successful brain work as the actual task itself. — Richard Restak

The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about. I myself can only wish that my stories were, indeed, nothing but incredible fabrications. I have stayed alive all these years clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion. I have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. But each time I tried to push them into the dark, they came back stronger and more vivid than ever. Like cancer cells, these memories have taken root in my mind and eaten into my flesh. — Haruki Murakami

Nearly every taping or audition has to be in an American accent, so you don't have a choice; you just have to get good at it. I'm sure you can appreciate accents - it's like learning any skill, you have to work at it and work at it and it takes an awful lot of time, until it's muscle memory and you don't have to think about it anymore. — Jeremy Irvine

There are some stories, some memories, that if you tell them after dark, they seem to gain weight, substance, as if there are things listening, waiting to hear themselves spoken of again. Words have power. But even thinking about them is sometimes enough to make the air in a room heavy. — Laurell K. Hamilton

His mind was constantly thinking about her, while he decided to recite a poem that he had written for her long ago. While he narrated, the words conjured memories like ghosts into the room. — Sulaiman Sait

Memories are important," he said.
"But it hurts, Magnus. Thinking about her makes me ache. — Cassandra Clare

Sometimes I'm inspired by a certain part of my life - I'm thinking about a place and I'll mix the colors from memory. — Jose Parla

Photography has definitely been my favorite way to remember things. At least for me that's how my brain processes things, of memories or moments - if I take a picture of it I can remember so many more details. I think it's about choosing the exact picture in my head that signifies or symbolizes a moment - almost as if you're using film. It's almost archaic. — Dianna Agron

I listen to all of my Dutch happy-hardcore songs from my raving techno days when I was about 14. It's the most horrible music ever. I think it's some kind of muscle memory that brings me back to when I was 14. It makes me bounce around the gym quite happily. — Lara Stone

For the first time, Duroy thought of all that was hidden in her past and began to speculate. Obviously she'd already had lovers, but what sort were they and what kind of society did they come from? A vague jealousy, a sort of hostility against her, stirred in him, an hostility directed against everything that he did not know about her, all that part of her feelings and life which did not belong to him. He looked at her, irritated by the secrets hidden in that pretty, silent little head, which perhaps at that very moment was thinking with regret of another man, of other men. How he would have liked to peer into her memories, explore them and learn all there was to know about them! — Guy De Maupassant

I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older ... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them. — Jennifer Egan

I was thinking about hitting races and stuff, but it's just, I think it's more of the era of when I was a kid and it just brings back memories. I gotta just chill and live in the past. — Matt Skiba

I keep thinking my father gave me Turgenev, and then I realize at some point, Oh, this is a false memory. I mean, that's one of the things that interests me about memoir. It should be as much about how we remember, and that includes false memories, and the realization that one is having a false memory. That's the kind of an interesting way of layering the whole experience of recollection. — Marco Roth

When someone close to you dies, the memories and recollections of them are painful. It isn't until the fifth stage of grief that the memories of them stop hurting as much; when the recollections become positive. When you stop thinking about the person's death, and remember all of the wonderful things about their life. — Colleen Hoover

Learning in the true sense of the word is possible only in that state of attention, in which there is no outer or inner compulsion. Right thinking can come about only when the mind is not
enslaved by tradition and memory. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it's a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those fifty fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that's one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does. — Shelby Foote

The earliest memories I have from my childhood are of my mum getting ready to go on stage. I must have been about five and I would watch her vomiting backstage on opening night, and then the next minute she became Isabella, the Queen of Spain. At the time I remember thinking, 'What kind of schizophrenic job is this?' Now it all makes sense. — Javier Bardem

When I first started to remember specific memories of abuse, I felt like I had a storm cloud over me for about two or three days beforehand. When the memory finally surfaced, I felt like I was alone in a dark cave. I stayed in bed just thinking and crying and eating chocolate. I wrote in my healing journal and talked it out with a friend. I examined what I thought and how I felt and cried some more. It was agonizing. The more issues I faced, the stronger I got. It wasn't a pleasant process, but I knew it would be over in a few days and I would feel alive again. With each memory, I recovered faster and I had longer and longer breaks in between them. Facing them made me stronger. I was able to see more and more of the truth without it overwhelming me. Even though the memories increased in intensity, it was easier to deal with them. — Christina Enevoldsen

It was about the preciousness of that, and how they viewed those birds as art, as something valuable. I didn't care one way or another back then, but now, thinking about my grandparents - who are still alive but getting older - I see the birds as sort of time capsules. Now I go home during the holidays and they hold a lot of weight in terms of nostalgia and memory. Now they mean everything. — Nick Cave

There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day. — Jacques Derrida

I'm thinking about anything and everything. I'm making stuff up in my head, I'm using sense memory. Sometimes when it doesn't come and you've got no choice because you're getting paid to do it, you grasp at straws. It's always easy now with my kids. I just create some "what-ifs" in my head, something horrible that would devastate me as a mother. — Vera Farmiga

When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine - like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing. — Mary McCarthy

A great love is a lot like a good memory. When it's there, and you know it's there, but its just out of your reach, it can be all that you think about. And you can focus on it, and try to force it. But the more that you do, the more you seem to push it away. But if you're patient, and hold still ... Maybe. Just maybe, it'll come to you. — Burnie Burns

English philosopher Bertrand Russell, another prominent twentieth-century pacifist, once used those medicinal facts about iodine to build a case against the existence of immortal souls. "The energy used in thinking seems to have a chemical origin ... ," he wrote. "For instance, a deficiency of iodine will turn a clever man into an idiot. Mental phenomena seem to be bound up with material structure." In other words, iodine made Russell realize that reason and emotions and memories depend on material conditions in the brain. He saw no way to separate the "soul" from the body, and concluded that the rich mental life of human beings, the source of all their glory and much of their woe, is chemistry through and through. — Sam Kean

I think that, in a sense, there's something about photography in general that we could associate with memory, or the past, or childhood. — Gregory Crewdson

The human mind is a rover, it constantly returns to think about times past, cogitates upon the future, and actively considers the entire range of alternative plans to meet our daily survival demands. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me
a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we lost and may never have cared for. — Andre Aciman

To see something marvellous with your own eyes - that's wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you'll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won't ever really exist as a whole until you're together, talking or thinking about that moment ... that's worth more than one plus one. It's worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can't even imagine it. — Alastair Reynolds

There was quiet, and then Ronan said, "I better go feed the bird."
But he looked down at the gearshift instead, eyes unfocused. He said, "I keep thinking about what would've happened if Whelk had shot Gansey today."
Adam hadn't let himself dwell on that possibility. Every time his thoughts came close to touching on the near miss, it opened up something dark and sharp edged inside him. It was hard to remember what life at Aglionby had been like before Gansey. The distant memories seemed difficult, lonely, more populated with late nights where Adam sat on the steps of the doublewide, blinking tears tears out of his eyes and wondering why he bothered. He'd been younger then, only a little more than a year ago. "But he didn't. — Maggie Stiefvater

In the case of two actors connecting with each other and trusting each other, our bodies have memories without us having to consciously think about it, so rather than think, "Oh, I must think about my daughter dying," you just let that go and trust that you have all the emotions you need in there, and by losing yourself in the scene, that stuff kicks in without having to spend the day thinking about horrific things happening to your own child. — Michael Sheen

Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort. — Terence McKenna

But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world. He did it when he was feeling so awful that sometimes the pain seemed to transport him to another state, one in which everything, even the past that he worked so hard to forget, seemed to fade into a gray watercolor wash. He did it when his memories crowded out all other thoughts, when it took real effort, real concentration, to tether himself to his current life, to keep himself from raging with despair and shame. He did it when he was so exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again, — Hanya Yanagihara

It'd be nice to feel that claustrophobic feeling or the anxiety that the film Melancholia produces, but for me I look at it and think about what I was doing that day, where we shot it ... It's kind of like a weird memory. It's more a photo album of memories than being able to feel connected to myself. It's not easy to do. — Kirsten Dunst

If it wasn't for you, I don't know where I'd be. Thank you for genuinely loving me. Thank you for showing me That I was loved. Thank you for making me feel wanted. Thank you for guiding me and teaching me. Thank you for our beautiful memories. You made the difference In my life. You were my only bright spot. My comfort zone. My place of happiness and freedom. Just thinking about our love Brightens up my day. Flashbacks of us makes My heart happy. You were my favorite person In this entire world. You gave me what so many people Yearn for in life, GENUINE LOVE. — Stephanie Lahart

It's about moments in life that are great but don't last. They don't go on, but you always have the memory and they have an effect on you. That's what I was thinking about. — Sofia Coppola

He was thinking about men like his Uncle Ted, a Cornishman to his bones, who lived and would die in St. Mawes, part of the fabric of the place, remembered as long as there were locals, beaming out of fading photographs of the Life Boat on pub walls. When Ted died - and Strike hoped it would be twenty, thirty years hence - they would mourn him as the unknown Barrovian Grammar boy was being mourned: with drink, with tears, but in celebration that he had been given to them. What had dark, hulking Brockbank, child rapist, and fox-haired Laing, wife-torturer, left behind in the towns of their birth? Shudders of relief that they had gone, fear that they had returned, a trail of broken people and bad memories. — Robert Galbraith

Thats the thing about memories, they can make you sad, even if they are good memories. You like thinking back to them; they're the greatest treasure we have, and yetis always makes you a little sad because something has irreversibly passed. — Nicolas Barreau

At eighteen you don't think about memories, you tell them. — Nazim Hikmet

Posterity, n.
I try not to think about us growing old together, mostly because I try not to think about growing old at all. Both things - the years passing, the years together - are too enormous to contemplate. But one morning, I gave in. You were asleep, and I imagined you older and older. Your hair graying, your skin folded and creased, your breath catching. And I found myself thinking: If this continues, if this goes on, then when I die, your memories of me will be my greatest accomplishment. Your memories will be my most lasting impression. — David Levithan

...thinking about laughing with 2 yr old Findlay today - Dostoyevsky was right, "The soul is healed by being with children." ... — John Geddes

Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga. — William Zinsser

The one thing about kids is that you never really know exactly what they're thinking or how they're seeing. After writing about kids, which is a little bit like putting the experience under a magnifying glass, you realize you have no idea how you thought as a kid. I've come to the conclusion that most of the things that we remember about our childhood are lies. We all have memories that stand out from when we were kids, but they're really just snapshots. You can't remember how you reacted because your whole head is different when you stand aside. — Stephen King

Let's get into talking about how autism is similar animal behavior. The thing is I don't think in a language, and animals don't think in a language. It's sensory based thinking, thinking in pictures, thinking in smells, thinking in touches. It's putting these sensory based memories into categories. — Temple Grandin

Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you're not even a memory? Think about it, friends. It's not just a possibility. It is a certainty. — Jean Shepherd

Anyway, how can you say things like that? You don't know me at all. She wasn't really caught up in this game, but she was enjoying it, as she had enjoyed the dozens of declarations that had been made to her since she was eleven. Her earliest memories were of being told how beautiful she was. Something in her never believed the words, never felt satisfied. It wasn't modesty; it was a craving for more proof than anyone had ever yet given her. Her mind worked constantly at trying to understand for herself exactly what other people saw when they looked at her. She could never grasp it whole and living. Her deepest fantasy was to step outside of her skin and look at herself and find out just what people were thinking about. She spent her life experimenting with people to see how she could make them react, as if, in their response, she could discover herself. — Judith Krantz

History is so comprehensive and detailed. I couldn't be a history student. I thought there was a time when I couldn't be a history maker, because of my limited understanding of what that meant. Today, thinking about the passing of Julian Bond and a wonderful conversation with a woman who has influenced so much, I think we all are history makers. All of our names will not be as known as Mr. Bond's or in books, but our names will be on someone's tongue and our memories will be in someone's heart, and we will all be a part of someone's personal story. We have a unique opportunity at this very second to change how we affect someone's life as living history and historians. Flaws and all. Yep. — Robin Caldwell

When you're sober it's easier to stay in line with your train of thought. There's a lot more you're thinking about that you want to discuss, and there are a lot more memories that you're dealing with that you had pent up inside of you for so long because you had been drinking all of those years. — Ryan Montgomery

I stared at the stop sign and even though I was only five I thought, I will remember that stop sign for the rest of my life. The dents and the bumps, the colors and the shape, the three-fingered, black scuff and long silver scrape - even the dirty gray sky behind it. Days will go by and I will grow old but from time to time the image of this stop sign will come to my mind and I will think about it and remember what I was thinking at this exact time. I even remember thinking that I was awfully young to have such a profound thought and premonition but there it was. — April Adams

Our growing addiction to the Internet is impairing precious human capacities such as memory, concentration, pattern recognition, meaning-making, and intimacy. We are becoming more restless, more impatient, more demanding, and more insatiable, even as we become more connected and creative. We are rapidly losing the ability to think long about any- thing, even those issues we care about. We flit, moving restlessly from one link to another. — Margaret J. Wheatley

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, "We *told* you not to tell." But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on. — Anne Lamott

What most people call spontaneous recall usually involves memories that have been denied, not repressed. The survivor has always been aware that the sexual abuse happened, but he or she has studiously avoided thinking about it. A catalyst sets the memory process in motion, but the essential factor in the memory surfacing is the readiness of the survivor to deal with the reality of abuse. — Renee Fredrickson

There are times now, and my life has changed so completely, that I think back on the early years and I find myself thinking: It was not that bad. Perhaps it was not. But there are times, too - unexpected - when walking down a sunny sidewalk, or watching the top of a tree bend in the wind, or seeing a November sky close down over the East River, I am suddenly filled with the knowledge of darkness so deep that a sound might escape from my mouth, and I will step into the nearest clothing store and talk with a stranger about the shape of sweaters newly arrived. This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can't possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don't know how others are. So much of life seems speculation. — Elizabeth Strout

I think that objects have memories. I'm always thinking that I'll go to the museum and see something and have a big memory about some other lifetime. — Kiki Smith

But even though I felt her presence, I also felt the habitual fruitlessness of thinking about her. Her images, partly memories of her, partly memories of photos I had seen of her, yielded no new answers to old mysteries. — Jane Smiley

I'm glad I found you," Kane said quietly, stepping back as Avery stood.
"I think it was more like me finding you, handsome." For Kane, the sentimental memories were so strong; all he could do was stand there as they held their babies, thinking about their lives, their future,and his love for Avery.
"I can't imagine my life without you," Kane proclaimed sweetly.
"Good. I don't want you to. — Kindle Alexander

Past is gone and there's no way to travel in time. Future is unforeseeable and there's no guarantee what will happen next. So why losing now. Thinking about past memories & events would mostly causes you sadness. Thinking of future and what may happen would causes you anxiety. Present is the time you're living in and you can do anything right Now. So think about it, what have you done? What will you do? Or what to do now? — Russ

I think I wanted to be a storyteller because I had a very active dream life. My life was boring, and I dreamed about a life bigger than my own. I've always just been that person, from my earliest memories at age 2. — Joseph McGinty Nichol

You must create the character's internal life. What do I mean by internal life? I mean the thoughts, feelings, memories, and inner decisions that may not be spoken. When we look into the eyes of actors giving fully realized performances, we can see them thinking. We're interested in what they're experiencing that may never be spoken, that quality of nonverbal expression - which is as much a part of the characters as breathing and as real as what they say and do. This is their internal life. It helps us believe in the characters and care about them. — Larry Moss