Marjane Satrapi Quotes

We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

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.

As people construct a life narrative, researchers have found, they tend to remember more events from the teens and twenties than from any other time. It's called the 'reminiscence bump.'

Memory doesn't come as a straight narrative. It comes in small moments with all this white space.

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.

I was worried that one day, 40 years from now, I would look back and wouldn't be able to remember the details of my life, so I've written them all down.

A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

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.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

'One Minus One' and 'Barcelona, 1975' are more or less autobiographical.

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.

I'm in a position to look back at my life, and I realized there were a number of experiences that needed to be documented.

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.

I wish I were one of those terribly clever people who, when they write their autobiographies, always say, when I was fifteen months old I distinctly remember my Aunt Fanny saying to me, etc.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

How we experience memory sometimes, it's not linear. We're not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we're just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

I remember everything from 1976. I remember I was 14, and I remember my routines.

Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler.

If you gave me an hour in the day between '09 and '14, I could have told you exactly where I was and what I was doing.

One can never be sure whether a very early memory is a real memory or just the recollection of something which you were told happened.

I think I have had a remarkable and colorful life, so I decided to share it.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

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

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.