Oliver Sacks Quotes

As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America...

Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind. We wallow in nostalgia but manage to get it all wrong. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories... but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted d?j? vu.

I was on 'Melrose' at a time where we had to all go home and be there at the same time when the show was on, or set your VCR. But that was a big thing, and people of my generation still talk about that. They remember where they were, at what point of their lives that show came, and then talking about it the next day.

It used to be that we felt that when we went to a theater, a legitimate theater... that we were going to share an experience together. That when we walked away where there would be something to talk about in that movie that had some meaning and relevance in our lives. And I think that we have lost that.

You as an audience can look at these things as films, but I remember them as social experiences.

No experience exists unless it's a shared one.

That's part of what I remember about seeing the movies that influenced me: the experience of watching them with a crowd and how they react to something.

Because our ancestors lived in social groups that changed slowly, because they encountered the same people throughout their lives, they could keep almost every social detail they needed to know in their heads.

What I like about music is that you make a song, you've got your ideas in it, and people make that song part of their life - they hang out with their friends to it, they get in arguments to it, they get married to it, they get divorced to it. It's in their world, and it takes on its own life.

Sadly - and I think this is why it's so important that we do this more - I don't have that guiding light. You know, "Oh, that Sleepless in Seattle bilingual something," like, it doesn't exist. I don't have it in my memory, and that's why I thought it was important to make it.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

Memory has always been social. Now we're using search engines and computers to augment our memories, too.

Everybody has an image of [princess Margaret], to a certain extent. But I felt it would have been harder if we were playing them as they are now. In a way, I don't know how much of a living memory we as a collective have of them in the '50s, when Margaret was 21 and this sort of Elizabeth Taylor. You don't think of your grandparents as being teenagers. You just can't - your brain just can't go there!

The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.

Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.

History is the memory of things said and done.

If you’re a black Christian, you have a real short memory.

To live (as I understand it) is to exist within a conception of time. But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time. Every memory, no matter how remote its subject, takes place 'Now,' at the moment it's called to the mind. The more something is recalled, the more the brain has a chance to refine the original experience. Because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.

New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.

My generation knew pretty well what happened 50 years before our birth. Now I follow all the quiz programs because they are a paramount example of the span of memory of the young generation - they are able to remember everything that happened in their life but not before.

I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.

The few surviving Armenians no longer ask to go home. They do not ask for restitution. They ask simply to have the memory of their obliteration acknowledged. It is a moral obsession, the lonely legacy passed onto the third and fourth generation who no longer speak Armenian but who carry within them the seeds of resentment that will not be quashed.

Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.

The inside jokes weren't jokes anymore. They had become stories. Nobody brought up the bad names or the bad times. And nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with more nostalgia.

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.