“I am sitting on someones knee being fed with gruel. The plate is on a grey oilcloth with a red border, the enamel white, with blue flowers on it, and reflecting the sparse light from the window. By bending by head sideways and forwards, I try out various view points. As I move my head, the reflections in the gruel plate change and form new patterns. Suddenly, I vomit over everything. That is probably my very first memory.”

—Ingmar Bergman, from his autobiography, The Magic Lantern. As quoted by Jonathan Cott in On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering, 2005.