Chris Bohjalian Quotes

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

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

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

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

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

The more Ronald Reagan repeated a story, the more he believed it and the more he resisted information that undermined premises.

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.

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.

The blind see what they want to see.

Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.

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.

Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.

I know all too well that people only see what they want to see and remember only what they want to remember.

For what a man would like to be true, that he more readily believes.

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.

We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

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

This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.

To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills.

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.

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.

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