Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

There's nothing more interesting than the details of someone's life.

To be human is to have a collection of memories that tells you who you are and how you got there.

Old age is just a record of one's whole life.

Over time, you accumulate a lot of life material.

A good writer - and I think it's this way with actors too - even if you have two lines, you have to do the same complete work as if you're number one on the call sheet. If you get in an elevator and somebody gets on, rides two floors and gets off, that person has a reality that goes back to when they were born. They have memories, they have people, they have a life. They are doing something right now that the camera is on them in their space. We live in our own close-up all the time.

Memory - the very skin of life.

The mix in our rooms is so touching: the clutter and the cracks in the wall belie a bleakness or brokenness in our lives; while photos and a few rare objects show our pride, our rare shining moments ... these rooms are future ruins

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.

Every heart is made of stories.

One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It's all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.

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

All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.

Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn't mean that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not.

. . . your history is no less important to your survival than your ability to breathe. In the end, you can only determine whether to saturate your memories with pain or with perspective. Forgetting is not an option. I tell you the truth now: Pain was not God's plan for this life. It is a reality, but it is not a part of the plan.

Yea from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records.

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.

Not surprisingly, as the pioneer theme is presented, each goes back in memory to his or her own family line. There are usually examples to identify and which fit the definition of a pioneer: "one who goes before, showing others the way to follow." Some, if not all, made great sacrifices to leave behind comfort and ease and respond to that clarion call of their newly found faith.

Every house we have lived in, every building to which our hands have lent their work, belongs to us by virtue of love or of regret.

The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

Every man remembers his childhood as a kind of mythical age, just as every nation's childhood is its mythical age.

Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.

The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection.

I wish I had a memory of that first violent shove, the shock of cold air, the sting of oxygen into new lungs. Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.

I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is in my heart and mind and memories.

I don't remember the first poem that I wrote because I've been creating poems since I was around 2 or 3. I don't have any memory of that but my mom has written evidence of it. I've always liked playing with words so when I was younger it had a lot more to do with rhyme and sounds.