Memory Trigger Quotes

I don't know why, but rain comes into my head the minute I think of my childhood.

Music is a total constant. That's why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in your or the world, that one song says the same, just like that moment.

I cry whenever I watch an emotional scene that I did, just because it brings me back to that moment. It's like, I remember being there; I remember feeling what I felt. It's really weird, right?

But it was smell that carried memory.

One day, I went to buy something for my dad at the shops, and I heard a song by Nat King Cole called 'Stardust Melody.' It was like I went into a trance or something. I forgot all about my dad sending me to the shop. When I got home, I explained to him what happened. I thought I was going to get a whipping, but he understood.

For a moment he could have sworn he smelled violets, which was very peculiar, since he had no idea what violets smelled like, except somehow he knew they smelled just like Lady Emma.

When I write a note, it sticks in my head differently.

I want to produce images that startle one into recollection.

The littlest thing can have the strongest connection when you're grieving. Your Proustian, poetic nerve is turned up to ten.

As a teen, 'Thunder Road' was always in my head.

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it's a pity we use it so little.

In bed at night, I could be reading some book, and I'll come across a sentence that's totally unrelated to some scene I did years ago. But I'll play the scene back in my mind and think, I did that wrong - I should've opened the door more slowly.

Lots of people I know have bootlegged tapes of performances and if they play it I will be transported back sometimes with happiness, sometimes with horror.

A simple woman down in Tyngsborough, at whose house I once stopped to get a draught of water, when I said, recognizing the bucket, that I had stopped there nine years before for the same purpose, asked if I was not a traveler, supposing that I had been traveling ever since, and had now come round again.

I like to capture moments. It's like a photograph. Ten years from now you look at the photograph and you don't remember it but rather the whole week or month around the photo.

The radio was on and that was the first time I heard that song, the one I hate. Whenever I hear it all I can think of is that very day riding in the front seat with Lucy leaning against me and the smell of Juicy Fruit making me want to throw up. How can a song do that? Be like a net that catches a whole entire day, even a day whose guts you hate? You hear it and all of a sudden everything comes hanging back in front of you, all tangled up in that music.

I remember I took a music course in junior year of high school, and some girl brought in 'Teardrops On My Guitar,' and she was like, 'Isn't this song great?' And everyone was like, 'Who's Taylor Swift?' And now, every time I listen to Taylor Swift, I remember that moment.

Just this morning, out of a large memory for songs, and having been obsessed by them since childhood, suddenly, at the age of 84, I thought of a song I hadn't thought of in over 50 years. It came into my head unbidden.

15 minutes will open up the amnesia and you'll have full recall.

You do remember things that people say in movies. You remember particular lines and things that are funny. But, you also remember really strong images. Images have a way of bypassing your brain and hitting you emotionally.

I'll never forget when I was, like, 17, and 'Highway to Hell' came on the radio, and I was like, 'Dude, listen to that guy's voice!'

Taking walks sometimes bring back memories of my childhood because a smell might trigger a memory.

A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.

Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.