Karla Souza Quotes

I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?

Imagine there wasn't photography. Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? It links us all. It keeps us all together; it's what our history is.

My son tells me, 'Do you realize you are the last one? The last person who was an eyewitness to the golden age?' Young people, even in Hollywood, ask me, 'Were you really married to Humphrey Bogart?' 'Well, yes, I think I was,' I reply. You realize yourself when you start reflecting - because I don't live in the past, although your past is so much a part of what you are - that you can't ignore it. But I don't look at scrapbooks. I could show you some, but I'd have to climb ladders, and I can't climb

I think everyone must have a first memory of some house, some room, a vivid picture that will remain deep down in one forever.

Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.

Clothing is . . . an exercise in memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that. They are like signposts in the search for the past.

If i were to lose my memories, I would rely on music. There is so much of my story embedded in each.

From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.

As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.

Memories were the markers of the journey through life. It was necessary to know where you had come from. Only then could you know where you were going.

You and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.

A great love is a lot like a good memory. When it's there, and you know it's there, but its just out of your reach, it can be all that you think about. And you can focus on it, and try to force it. But the more that you do, the more you seem to push it away. But if you're patient, and hold still...Maybe. Just maybe, it'll come to you.

The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light. The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and of people who will see a world that I shall never know.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

Depending on their fondest memory of you, most people hold on so tightly to their fondest memory they don’t usually let you be anything greater than that. And that’s one of the things I think I allowed myself to be a victim of earlier in my career. What I learned as I got older is I decide. I decide what it’s like for me, not other people. You can be whatever you’d like to be. You just have to choose it.

We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.

Yeah, a memory's never finished, if you really think about it.

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.

Men... look back on the children who were once themselves, and attempt to reconstruct them. But they can no longer think like the child.

I still define myself by the places that I've been.

Also, where does your identity come from? Your memory, of course.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

After they remodeled Yankee Stadium I didn't feel that the ghosts were there anymore. It just wasn't the same.

Every hour spent on the Caine was a great hour in all our lives-if you don't think so now you will later on, more and more.