John Petrucci Quotes

I keep all of my letters, postcards, and thank you notes. I'll keep them forever!

I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom.

I archive a lot of my clothes and have them wrapped up and in boxes. I call them 'little tombs' and keep them in a storage space... I would never get rid of the dress I wore on the night I won my Oscar. When I die, someone can have it, but not a minute before!

One of the things I've always loved is collecting telling little details.

When I was a kid. I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but I'd always been singing. I had my first little acoustic when I was six. But I started being in bands when I was 13. Crappy rock bands, avant-garde things where we'd, like, 'wanna go against the norm, man.'

The guitar l learned on was probably worth $4 or something, but it was priceless to me. It meant so much.

I don't know what the instinct is, to save every report card, every half-sentence scribbled note, but my mother did it pretty effectively, and I've done it to a fare-thee-well.

Sometimes a single item can wrap up, in a nutshell, who a person is. In my grandparents' home, a clear plastic container was enthroned on top of the mahogany bar for at least a decade. Painted on the lid in pink, yellow and light blue was 'Have a Nosh With Mort & Ethel'.

I do hang on to things. I was so happy my father saved his army jacket. I grew up wearing that all through high school.

It's at my mom's house! She keeps everything. We were talking about it the other day - I threw something away, like our passes from Hollywood Horror Nights, and she was like, "Where are they?" I was like, "I threw them out." She was like, "You are just not the sentimental type."

So many objects, so many memories. Each was being labelled and packed away in bags just as it was in her mind. To be stored in an area that would sometime be called upon to teach and help in future life.

a book always keeps something of its owner between its pages.

The most important thing you leave behind is the stuff that turns into treasures when children find it

The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.

It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.

It’s hard to throw away history. It was like you were throwing away a part of yourself.

For women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

All those moments, those memories. Everything that we are, compressed in just two or three kilos of paper — the weight of a human heart.

I went straight out of high school, and when I was 17, all I wanted to do was play guitar.

Even if we no longer have much in common, we would have always had the past, which, in some ways, is just as important as the present or future. It is where we come from, what makes us who we are.

My dad gave $3 and a chicken for the first guitar I had.

In fact, I was too dumb to save any of the old comic books or the old artwork. I used to give them away.

I have a beautiful address book a friend gave me in 1966. I literally cannot open it again. Ever. It sits on the shelf with over a hundred names crossed out. What is there to say? There are no words. I'll never understand why it happened to us.

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.