"When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago-and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail-it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name."

Memory, Change, Past, Identity

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"When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago-and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail-it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name."

Exlpore more Memory quotes

"I remembered his laugh, like a flock of crows taking off."

Maggie Stiefvater, American Author

Memory, Crows, Sound, Emotion

"Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds."

Craig D. Lounsbrough, American Author

Memory, Truth, Wisdom, Inspirational

"Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her."

Jeanette Winterson, British Novelist

Memory, Understanding, Self, Isolation, Past

"Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead."

Jeanette Winterson, British Novelist

Memory, Past, Time, Narrative

"He lives vividly in her recollections, however, and his memory is etched on her soul."

Dean Koontz, American Author

Memory, Love, Soul, Emotion

"What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future."

Jeanette Winterson, British Novelist

Memory, Time, Life, Truth

"Scent is the strongest tie to memory."

Maggie Stiefvater, American Author

Memory, Emotion, Past, Connection

"Some of my anger has faded, but it isn't hard to call back. All I have to do is think about how cold the air was and how loud the laughter was. Look at her. She's a child."

Veronica Roth, American Author

Memory, Anger, Cold, Laughter

"People never forget two things, their first love and the money they wasted watching a bad movie."

Amit Kalantri, Indian Author

Memory, Love, Money, Forget

"It's not that I can't remember. It's that I prefer not to remember, which means that I prefer not to remember what not remembering did to me the last time I did it."

Craig D. Lounsbrough, American Author

Memory, Truth, Power, Wisdom

Explore more quotes by Chuck Klosterman

"When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day."

Writing

"There is not, in a material sense, any benefit to being right about a future you will not experience. But there are intrinsic benefits to constantly probing the possibility that our assumptions about the future might be wrong: humility and wonder."

Wisdom

"And I'm probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually."

Change

"The future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along."

Uncertainty

"We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it's that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not)."

Wisdom

"It didn't seem remotely possible. I had no idea how people got those jobs, I didn't know what the steps were, it never even dawned on me. It seemed so outside the realm of possibility."

People

"The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad."

Change

"It's hard for Americans to differentiate between talent and notoriety, TV confuses people."

Talent

"The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself."

Fun

"I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it."

Experience