Terry Gross Quotes

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

In our development, as we grow throughout our lives, the structure of our beliefs becomes very complicated, and we make it even more complicated because we make the assumption that what we believe is the absolute truth.

You can't tell someone they are wrong about their own life.

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

Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.

The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.

We are all at the center of our own narrative, but it's a narrative that changes every time we retell it.

When someone starts talking to me about the truth, what I hear is what they're telling me about themselves.

No one seemed able to look at themselves, coolly, from the outside. Their reality was all that could be seen in the light cast ahead by their own wishful thinking.

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.

The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story.

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

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.

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.

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

Your positions on EVERYTHING are based on the story you tell yourself and not some universal fact from the universal fact database.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

There can be many opinions on a thing, but there is only one truth." Vashet smiled lazily. "And if the pursuit of the truth was my goal, that would concern me." She gave a long yawn, stretching like a happy cat. "Instead I will focus on the joy in my heart, [...}

It is as easy to deceive one's self without perceiving it, as it is difficult to deceive others without their finding out.

The biggest lie is the lie we tell ourselves in the distorted visions we have of ourselves, blocking out some sections, enhancing others. What remains are not the cold facts of life, but how we perceive them. That's really who we are.

What the philosopher is seeking is not truth, but rather the metamorphosis of the world into man.

What are we but our stories?