Elliot Perlman Quotes

The past is always - one moment it's what happened three minutes ago, and one minute it's what happened 30 years ago. And they flow into each other in ways that we can't predict and that we keep discovering in dreams, which keep bringing up feelings and moments, some of which we never actually saw.

It's like I'm stuck in a time bubble. Memories keep coming back, and of course, memories are a huge part of literature and cinema, from "Stand by Me" to "Blade Runner."

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

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

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.

Memories are contrary things; if you quit chasing them and turn your back, they often return on their own.

Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.

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

I don't write diaries and things like that, but I have a fantastic memory. I call that like a magic carpet. I can really concentrate and travel back in the past I don't know how many years from now and evoke that space if I wanted.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.

Perhaps even these things, one day, will be pleasing to remember.

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.

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

I can always remember the dances, even from shows I did 40 years ago.

There's all kinds of those moments in your life where either through a weird set of circumstances, or a song you hear, or a smell you smell, or one person says something totally out of the context without the meaning that you assigned to it, but you snap back to the way you were when you were 14 or 15. We all deal with that.

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.

Acting brings up a lot of the past. I use my memories, whether they're good or bad.

When I write about things, it's a lot to do with sense memory. How things smell and taste can bring incredible memories flooding back and transport you in an instant to another time and place.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

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.