Lily Tomlin Quotes

People always complain about their memories, never about their minds.

Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.

If you can't remember the small things, how are you going to remember the big things? The mind is a real dangerous neighborhood to travel by ourselves.

I am mentally bifocal.

I'm very good at forgetting people.

In question-and-answer sessions after a reading or during an interview, I forget the question if I'm giving too long an answer. And at the end, I can't remember any of the questions. The more anxious I am about remembering, the more likely I am to forget.

Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. I can spend half a dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about.

I've always been forgetful.

Selective amnesia is a good thing to have. So is good focus.

As soon as they're out of your sight, you are out of their mind.

I just remembered that I'm absent minded... wait, I mean I lost my mind, I can't find it.

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty.

Did you forget? I'm a heartless wretch!

Concentration comes not from trying hard to focus on something, but from keeping your mind open and directing it at nothing.

Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.

If I ever lose my mind I hope some honest person will find it and take it to Lost and Found.

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.

I would have you imagine, then, that there exists in the mind of man a block of wax... and that we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or cannot be taken, then we forget or do not know.

The more you say, the less people remember.

Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.

Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also.

Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state.

You know how it is: as soon as you decide to forget something, your brain comes to the conclusion that it's the most fascinating thing in the world.

To learn from experience, we must remember it, and, for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend.