Jay Parini Quotes

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

You can't trust your memory. You change it to suit yourself.

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

But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.

Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories; memories told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I've always been interested in that.

Memory is often - perhaps usually - a distorting lens: what we think we remember isn't the way it was at all. It's what we'd like to remember.

You can do fascinating things with the tricks memory can play and tell. People can come to believe things which didn't happen at all if they're told them enough times.

Invented memory is a subject that fascinates me.

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

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

Recalling a memory is not like playing a tape recorder. It's a creative process.

I think that's the greatest gift one can have: point of view. You know? I've come to believe that if you have a bad memory of something, change it.

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.

You can't recover memories of a missing event. That's a fallacy.

I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience, but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up, because you're filling in spaces.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances

One can never be sure whether a very early memory is a real memory or just the recollection of something which you were told happened.

It's become a cliche to say that a piece of drama is about 'the nature of truth.' But 'Rectify' so openly plays with the slippery nature of memory that the label directly applies.

Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation.

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

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

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