William Howard Taft Quotes

Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.

Things like the movie 'Memento' are interesting to me because our memories of the things we've done and how we've behaved form our notion of who we are, what our character is. So if part of that were missing, what does that actually say about you? And what does it say about your sense of responsibility for things if you can't remember them?

How will we know it’s us without our past?

How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?

Sometimes it can be easy to forget where your roots are or where you came from.

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

I couldn't remember my name for weeks. I'd be at the theater and hear them calling 'Miss Stanwyck, Miss Stanwyck,' and I'd think 'Where is that dame? Why doesn't she answer? By crickie, it's me!

Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is - and still not caring.

I just learned that, even though in a past life, I was a model, too.

Who you are, where you've been and what you've done is all up here, captured and preserved in your memories. If you lost that - the story of your own origins - you'd lose your identity, your sense of self.

Insanity - to have to construct a picture of one's life, by making inquiries of others.

He forgets that he was someone's dream once, himself.

I'm the Vice-President. They know it, and they know that I know it.

He raised his eyes. "Sister. See. This time I knew you." Asha's heart skipped a beat. "Theon?" His lips skinned back in what might have been a grin. Half his teeth were gone, and half those still left him were broken and splintered. "Theon," he repeated. "My name is Theon. You have to know your name.

I'm insane, not forgetful.

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

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

In Truth I found myself incorrigible with respect to Order; and now I am grown old, and my Memory bad, I feel very sensibly the want of it.

You get more insight as you get older, on everything. I kind of woke up one morning and was like, 'Oh I see what's happening, I get everything'. I woke up and was like, 'I get it, I'm a product'.

Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother’s bureau. I wasn’t just the madwoman in the attic — I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.

You have to self-reflect. If you forget who you actually are, then what's the use of even looking in the mirror.

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

If people do not know where they have been and what they have been they don't know what they are. They don't know where they going to have to go or where they still have to be.