Mental Replay Quotes

Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.

In bed at night, I could be reading some book, and I'll come across a sentence that's totally unrelated to some scene I did years ago. But I'll play the scene back in my mind and think, I did that wrong - I should've opened the door more slowly.

My memories of events and games are fragmented.

I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.

I wonder if the conversations you've never had with someone count, if you've been over them a thousand times in your mind.

After you finish a book, the story still goes on in your mind. You can never change the beginning. But you can always change the end.

Through most of my life, music has been like a radio that plays and plays in my head.

That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.

I think it's harder to forgive ourselves for mistakes that we made because we keep dwelling on it. We want to know how it affects other people, if they liked us for it, if they didn't like us. I think we stress over it, we replay it in our mind. It becomes an old tape that years later we continue to play it in our mind.

The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind.

...but I could not sleep without proper covering and spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious.

A chief cause of unhappiness is what I call mental movies. Mental movies are a misuse of the imagination. You know how it goes. You have a painful experience with someone, then run it over and over in your mind. You visualize what you said, what he did, how you both felt. As awful as it is, you feel compelled to repeat the film day and night. It is as if you were locked inside a theatre playing a horrible movie.

By recollecting the pleasures I have had formerly, I renew them, I enjoy them a second time, while I laugh at the remembrance of troubles now past, and which I no longer feel.

All of these stories bounced around in my mind for a long time.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

A song will keep going round in my brain and keep me awake.

He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.

I'll run through things over and over and over again in my head and think, "How could I have done that better?" Silly things like that.

The song is about knowing the end result of every situation you're in, and being able to play it out in your mind and see it before it happens. It's about addiction, really, about knowing how it's all going to end up. In that sense, you're watching a movie of yourself all the time - and then you want out of that movie.

Like most professional golfers, I have a tendency to remember my poor shots a shade more vividly than the good ones.

I'm always freaking people out because I'll be out somewhere and I'll hear someone say something and then later on I'll say it again word for word. It's almost like recording it in your head.

A good athlete always mentally replays a competition over and over, even in victory, to see what might be done to improve the performance the next time.

A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.

Those 12 o'clock kick-offs can be good if you win as then you've got the rest of the day to celebrate and enjoy it. On the other hand, if you lose, it's not a nice feeling. You spend the rest of the day mithering about the game and going over it in your mind for the next eight hours.