B. F. Skinner Quotes

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

I was starting to think I was making up memories, just to have answers. Our brain does that sometimes. Or at least mine does.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good.

Memory... is an internal rumor.

memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.

I think it's a universal thing in every family, that people have their own specific versions of pivotal events or even small memories.

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I’ve created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I’m creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too.

I think it's important for people to realize that we were all young, all naive, and also we had lived in a time that had magic.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

Memories contain hidden editorials on current events.

I think memories are like dreams. Not reliable proof of anything. I can't prove a memory any more than I can prove a dream.

Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.

Maybe the memory does play tricks. Increasingly, I'm thinking, 'What was their name? I knew that name yesterday.' I think that's what happens. At some point, I'll forget that I ever worked with Peter Cook, I suppose, and Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller.

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

The past is never where you think you left it.

Isn't it fortunate how selective our recollections usually are.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

There are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture was, perhaps, imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrance.