personal recollection Quotes

My first recollection of hearing Wendell Phillips is from my college days, though of course he was always one of my heroes, and I may have heard him before, for we were an anti-slavery family.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled thoughts that clutter my mind and bookshelves, then maybe I can explain what happened. Maybe the worlds I have inhabited for the past seven years will assume order and logic and wholeness on paper. Maybe I can tell my story in a way that is useful to someone else.

I was two when we left Indiana, and I don't really remember it that well.

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

Remember what I've told you. Remember me.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

I actually don't remember Apollo 11 exactly because, at the time, I was five years old. The landing happened at night, and the walk on the moon happened at night eastern time, and I asked my parents; my mom said I was probably asleep, and so I just don't have any recollection. I do have recollection of the later missions to the moon.

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

Looking back over all the sporting spectacles of 2016, I still pinch myself at the things I was fortunate to witness in person.

The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.

I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your bones.

Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief.

And that was it; it was so easy for her. My own memories did not even belong to me. But I knew she was wrong. I had seen that comet. I knew it as well as I knew my own face, my own hands. My own heart.

I guess what I find so interesting about memory, and its role in a person's identity, is how the attempt to achieve accuracy requires you to remove yourself from your life in an authorial manner.

I remember Karoi as a very hot, flat place, but in reality, it is all hills. We just lived next to an airstrip - the only flat piece of land around. That was my world as a three-year-old and sums up the indelible power of memory to a young child.

I do not recall ever seeing Spirit perform live.

I can just remember the blitz of Manchester, or perhaps my father's tales about the blitz of Manchester. I can remember the blackout, the powdered eggs, and the gas masks. But I think no British person should pretend that being resident in England could count as being in the thick of the action.

I thought I did until I looked at some old game films. (When asked if he played college football)

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

When I was young, I believe I met Nicolas Cage. I think I was probably eight, and I remember seeing him at somebody's house - it was an event, and he happened to be there.

I did keep a travel diary once and it was a big mistake. All I remember of that trip is what I bothered to write down.

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.