Joshua Foer Quotes

As people construct a life narrative, researchers have found, they tend to remember more events from the teens and twenties than from any other time. It's called the 'reminiscence bump.'

I feel like every catastrophe in our lives, you remember exactly where you were, what you were doing, who you were with, almost down to what you were wearing.

Four years ago... no, it was yesterday.

The idea that memory is linear is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself-can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind? A very elusive and tricky concept, time.

A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.

Film is something that came later into my life.

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

The ability to share whole scenes form our lives will be a valuable thing over time.

I open journal, I look at the picture and I remember where I was. And I remember the time of day, the temperature of the air, what music was playing, or who was talking to me, or who was looking over my shoulder and what conversations we had and the smells of the earth and the time of year it was. It's all there for me in a way that we don't get looking at a snapshot. Most of us look back at a snapshot from ten years ago and say, where was that? We don't even remember where we were.

You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.

The past is never where you think you left it.

Your debut record, in terms of lyrical content, can be about the last couple of years of your life obviously, but your first record into the world is also about everything else that you've ever experienced in your life until that moment.

Are not there little chapters in everybody's life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?

You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.

I'm very musically inclined. My parents were opera singers. As a young child, I could hear operas and I knew if they were sad, or if they reminded me of something, or they brought back a memory.

I don't think anybody thinks about their past much, unless they're in a mental institution.

The older you get the more you live in the past

In my group of friends, I was always the one who remembered everything. The stories, the boys my friends and I dated, all the details. So I think a part of me was always filing them away, although at the time I wasn't sure why.

Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions.

There is a history in all men's lives.

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

What are your historical Facts still more your biographical Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.

Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is up to us.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.