David Shields Quotes

What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

It's actually pretty complex, because there's two levels of reality in the narrative. One is what really took place, and the other is Spider's poisoned version of what took place.

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

Perception is reality.

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

I'm less interested in reality. I'm more interested in perception, the truth of the universe that we see.

As soon as anything is processed by memory, it’s fiction.

One's memories aren't what actually happened - they're very subjective. You can always make it much better, right?

Truth is an illusory notion.

Perception is reality. People take what they want to from things.

Born with blue spectacles, you would think the world was blue and never be conscious of the existence of the distorting glass.

Perception is one millionth of one percent reality (truth in fact).

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.

The blind see what they want to see.

Amazing what people make up based on what they choose to see.

There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.

We can easily represent things as we wish them to be.

Everything I've seen becomes real once it becomes memory. The films I've seen are interchangeable with things that have really happened to me.

That is the beauty of memory, isn’t it? Our reality is always clouded by our perceptions of truth. (Mnimi)

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.