Frank McCourt Quotes

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

When you reminisce aren't the times that someone's forcing you to reminisce. You reminisce other times in your life.

Let us say in the pocket of one of my old coats I find a movie ticket from many years ago. Once I see the ticket, not only do I remember that I saw this movie, but also scenes from this movie, which I think I have entirely forgotten, come back to me. Objects have this power, and I like it.

One has to spend time sort of really going back through one's memories. When you do start doing that then, you do recall more as time goes on.

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

Memory is imagination pinned down.

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.

What does it remember like?

I love nostalgia.

Now, you can bring up the past, but anybody can bring up the past. Even my daughter brings up the past sometimes. She makes a lot of jokes about the things that I've done.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

Wishes are recollections coming from the future.

He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life.

I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

Memory is a strange Bell—Jubilee, and Knell.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

[Memory] visits when it is hungry, not when you are.

I think "waste of your brain" is something that my mother would say to me occasionally - I think it's usually when I'm telling her something like that I can remember every outfit I've ever worn.

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.