Aja Naomi King Quotes

One's memories aren't what actually happened - they're very subjective. You can always make it much better, right?

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.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

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 a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.

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.

Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events.

Selective memory has always been the problem. An insistence on seeing some people and movements as the sum only of their brightest and most glorious moments, and others as unmitigated villains, makes for a vision of history that is tragically incomplete.

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

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

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.

The way we remember people, even their beauty is all so subjective and a matter of perspective.

People only remember what they want to remember.

isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.

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

Memories contain hidden editorials on current events.

Memory is never pure. And recollection is always coloured by the life lived since

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

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

Memory is a fiction we tell ourselves: just a piece of the truth.

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

I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.