Cormac McCarthy Quotes

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

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.

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

Passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones.

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.

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

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

It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.

[Harold Pinter] is a British playwright and is one of my favorite writers. Harold was very obsessed with when memory becomes mythology, that at some point you change your memory to fit who you believe you are.

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

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.

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

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

However, for story reasons, we needed to represent them in certain ways. One of the things that sort of blew me away that I didn't know when we started is that memories are completely susceptible to change. And this is, you know, one of the many reasons why certain people are trying to get it taken out - eyewitness testimony in court cases because it's very unreliable.

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

I've worked hard to remember it...The problem is I'm not sure what's real memory and what's my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light. Except I'm sure of my bright light.

Every time you recall a memory, you're basically making another copy of it and at that same point it is susceptible to new changes and adaptations. So, you know, if you remember from when you were, you know, in second grade and there was Christmas and you got a present from your grandfather and your mom was wearing a red dress, that may or may not all have happened.

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.

Invented memory is a subject that fascinates me.

Every time you recall a memory, you're basically making another copy of it and, at that same point, it is susceptible to new changes and adaptations.

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

Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

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

I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own.