Ingmar Bergman Quotes

Sometimes when I'm with you, I remember things I lost when I was your age. Like I remember the sound of the rain and the smell of the wind.

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

These beautiful days ... do not exist as mere pictures - maps hung upon the walls of memory to brighten at times when touched by association or will ... They saturate themselves into every part of the body and live always.

Then again, I think about high school every day and I think about being a little kid every day too.

We can revere our past, but we cannot re-capture it.

Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I'm a mix-tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

are memories pictures or the secret doorway?

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.

Smell can conjure up memories for me stronger than any other sense. Especially childhood memories. Perhaps because you were that much shorter and therefore closer to the ground and its smells.

Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.

Mild brown eyes beckon me to the past, but memory provides no clue.

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.

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.

Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.

...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

My eyes are dim with childish tears, My heart is idly stirred, For the same sound is in my ears Which in those days I heard.

Recalling, for me, is a great way of living, so not to forget.

The mother memories that are closest to my heart are the small gentle ones that I have carried over from the days of my childhood. They are not profound, but they have stayed with me through life, and when I am very old, they will still be near . . .

I came to the place of my birth and cried: "The friends of my youth, where are they?"--and an echo answered, "Where are they?

Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and runing its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do-the only thing-is run.