Jens Lekman Quotes

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.

Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.

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.

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.

People talk from memory and memory often plays false.

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

If memories were indeed like what a camera records, they could be forgotten, or they could fade so that they are no longer clear and vivid. But it would be difficult to explain how people could have memories that are both clear and vivid while also being wrong. Yet that happens, and it is not infrequent.

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

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

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.

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.

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

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.

You'll remember every damn loss. But the wins? You don't necessarily remember.

Memory is revisionist, you know. 'The Houston Kid' was based on true things that happened. But I know - from writing a memoir that I've been working on for awhile - that reconstructing memory is revisionism.

I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory, you are already in the realm of fiction.

Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.

People only remember what they want to remember.

Your memory is not my memory.

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.

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

Sometimes we have to change the truth in order to remember it.