If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.

The line plays on the double sense of “memorable”: a life that is worth remembering and a life that is actually remembered. Foer suggests that meaning isn’t only produced by extraordinary events; it is also produced by attention and deliberate recall. To “remember to remember” implies an active practice—cultivating habits (journaling, reflection, storytelling, mnemonic intention) that convert fleeting experience into durable memory. The quote also hints at a moral or existential claim: without conscious remembrance, even rich experiences can vanish, leaving one’s life feeling thinner in retrospect. A memorable life, then, is partly an achievement of perception and memory, not just circumstance.