Hidden Memories Quotes

Scars are just a treasure map for pain you've buried too deep to remember.

One of the things that I share with Bryan Becket is this hole in my childhood memory. There's about five years of my life that's virtually gone. I've thought about it a lot, and I've come to the conclusion that it might be for my own protection that those memories are gone, and maybe I don't want to dredge up those things.

Men conceal the past scenes of their lives.

In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle.

Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.

The Jungian view of drama would be that it affects all of our imaginations and somehow taps into our hidden, ancient, primordial memories.

So when I read this story, it unlocked a volcano of unanswered questions, because the questions had never been asked. It was an opportunity to come to terms with the lot of repressed history - and history of repression.

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.

Why do some memories bleed out of nowhere and others stay locked behind doors?

Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.

You may be embarrassed about the way you looked and the wacky clothes you wore when you were young, but normally, at least it's hidden in a box in the attic.

Little things in my past that I really thought were over and done with were still elements of the puzzle that weren't pieced together, and so she helped me do that.

Photography is very personal to me. God knows how many rolls of film I have that I've never shared.

People are more willing to talk about child abuse. When this whole McMartin thing went down, I was at a dinner party with about eight people, all from different backgrounds and from all over the world. And every single person at that table had had some weird experience as a child. I think everyone has - whether it was with a babysitter, or playing doctor, but usually when some older person tries to come in contact with you. It's amazing how much we block out.

My second year of Ryerson, I still lived at my folks' place. I went to the attic to find some prop for a play I was doing. And I found a scrapbook dedicated to my father's years at Ryerson as an actor. He never mentioned it.

Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.

No one else knows the whole story. I was there. I lived through it.

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.

The point of the daily diary exercise is not to record what you already know about what happened to you in the last 24 hours. Instead, it’s an invitation to the back of your mind to come forward and reveal to you the perishable images about the day you didn’t notice you noticed at all.

The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don't know is what your personal unconscious is made out of.

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

Many people do remember their births, but they deny it.

Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory.

He thinks about her, at this moment, in her house, a few thin walls away, packing her life into boxes and bags and he wonders what memories she is rediscovering, what thoughts are catching in her mouth like the dust blown from unused textbooks. He wonders if she has buried any traces of herself under her floorboards. He wonders what those traces would be if she had. And he wonders again why he thinks about her so much when he knows so little to think about.

My book has a lot of parts of my life that people don't know about.