John Lahr Quotes

I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any.

Who you are, where you've been and what you've done is all up here, captured and preserved in your memories. If you lost that - the story of your own origins - you'd lose your identity, your sense of self.

I didn't want to see her because it would make me feel better. I came because without her, it's hard to remember who I am.

It's easy to forget who you are.

Take a person’s memories, and you change who they are.

I used to have a really sharp memory. And its loss has proven destabilizing from an identity perspective.

It's not a little thing to lose your identification and who you believe yourself to be.

Also, where does your identity come from? Your memory, of course.

If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self - himself - he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.

I look at old photos of me, and I don't feel connected to them at all.

Things like the movie 'Memento' are interesting to me because our memories of the things we've done and how we've behaved form our notion of who we are, what our character is. So if part of that were missing, what does that actually say about you? And what does it say about your sense of responsibility for things if you can't remember them?

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.

Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is - and still not caring.

I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question: "What is I?" Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves?

Haven't lost your sense of humor after all but your sense of identity is what seems to have been misplaced. No. Wrong. You don't lose what you never had.

Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

It isn't difficult to leave King Lear or Macbeth, but once you have gone back to yourself, you want it to be the same self you have always been.

Our body is the place that our memories and dreams call home for the time being.

It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.

Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

I'm most afraid of losing my mind. You lose your identity, your sense of who you are, where you are.

Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.

How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?

A person likes to think of himself in a certain way, and when something happens that makes that no longer possible, you mourn the old self. The person you thought you were.

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.