Generational Memory Quotes

My generation knew pretty well what happened 50 years before our birth. Now I follow all the quiz programs because they are a paramount example of the span of memory of the young generation - they are able to remember everything that happened in their life but not before.

Every other species of talent carries with it its eternity; we enjoy the work of the poet, the painter, the sculptor, only as thousands will do after us; but the actor - his memory is with his generation, and that passes away.

We have depressions about every 10-20 years—just long enough for the current generation to forget the last depression.

All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it.

You know what it would just be amazing to be remembered, you know like a mum telling a daughter ‘the boyband of my time, One Direction, they just had fun and they’re just normal guys but terrible, terrible dancers.’

I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

My grandfather started his autobiography before he died; he never finished it. I would like to finish his autobiography because I finished mine.

So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.

German people get very uptight if you mention World War II. Germans today feel that what's past is past, new generations don't really remember it.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

I started doing some interviews with elderly people in the family because I knew they would pass away and we would lose the power of their story.

Nostalgia is partly illusion in that we remember things differently as we get older, etc. But that doesn't mean, when historians look back on the 1950s, say, from the year 2090, it won't be judged as a saner, slower, less narcissistic, more family-focused, and economically secure time.

Let this be our time in history so that someday we can tell our children and grandchildren that we were there, that we changed the course of history for the better.

I like making films about old people because they are repositories of amazing stories that they tell well. And they're incredibly good telly.

Several people have told me that one of the most meaningful events they could attend would be something at the White House with their children.

You don't have to be a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to figure out that when you title a memoir of your parents 'Them,' you're performing an act of distancing.

I was on 'Melrose' at a time where we had to all go home and be there at the same time when the show was on, or set your VCR. But that was a big thing, and people of my generation still talk about that. They remember where they were, at what point of their lives that show came, and then talking about it the next day.