Fawn M. Brodie Quotes

Memory is often less about truth than about what we want it to be.

The past has infinite value if one learns from it.

Selective memory has always been the problem. An insistence on seeing some people and movements as the sum only of their brightest and most glorious moments, and others as unmitigated villains, makes for a vision of history that is tragically incomplete.

People talk from memory and memory often plays false.

Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.

The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.

People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

We have to learn from the past.

People only see what they want to see and sometimes you can't do anything about that, so you just pick up the baton and you just run with it.

I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory, you are already in the realm of fiction.

The thing about wisdom is you store the past in your head.

People only remember what they want to remember.

there is no truly honest autobiography.

Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.

If you never noticed, it never happened.

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted.

What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

We do not actually know other people; we only know our judgments.

Our future will be shaped by the assumptions we make about who we are and what we can be.

Sometimes I'm confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious obviously isn't obvious.

I lift my arm out of the water. It's a log. Put it back under and it blows up even bigger. People see the log and call it a twig. They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop.

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

I may not be able to change the world I see around me, but I can change the way I see the world within me.