Your body actually reminds you about your age and your injuries - the body has a stronger memory than your mind.

Spoken from the vantage point of a dancer whose instrument is his own body, the remark contrasts intellectual self-conception with physical reality. Baryshnikov suggests that while the mind can minimize, forget, or reframe time and trauma, the body retains them as lived evidence—through pain, limitation, stiffness, or altered capacity. The line underscores an embodied view of memory: experience is stored not only as narrative recollection but as sensation and constraint. It also gestures toward aging as an unavoidable teacher in performance arts, where accumulated injuries and wear become a kind of involuntary autobiography, reminding the artist of mortality and the costs of virtuosity.