Philip Seymour Hoffman Quotes

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?

I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.

To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember

I never forget, remember that. Not an action, not a name, not a face.

Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what's behind them.

You never realize what a good memory you have until you try to forget something.

My memory's not too good.

I have a really bad memory, to be honest.

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

My memory is so bad that many times I forget my own name.

For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.

Sometimes it's a good thing we don't remember things half as well as books do.

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.

Why is it that we are born remembering, and live forgetting?

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

For someone who can’t remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can’t forget.

I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible.

And never forget, there is memory.

Estragon: I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.

I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be a space in my memory for each of them, or would I forget a little of Alaska every day for the rest of my life?

Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points.

Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.

Isn't it fortunate how selective our recollections usually are.