Marya Hornbacher Quotes

What you see is not what others see. We inhabit parallel worlds of perception, bounded by our interests and experience. What is obvious to some is invisible to others.

It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.

Some people who've read my story think I had a terrible childhood and that I was neglected or even abused, while others feel that my parents, while certainly flawed, also had truly wonderful qualities. And that's the way it should be, because in real life two people can look at the same president and one will see a hero and the other a villain.

There's a very fine line between one person's reality and another person's fantasy.

Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.

My mother and I could always look out the same window without ever seeing the same thing.

So something about that touched me, obviously, when I was young and it just stayed with me. I'm always amazed by that, because my experience seems to be so much different than what I'm told, so much of the time.

There is an inevitable divergence between the world as it is and the world as men perceive it.

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

One person's crazyness is another person's reality.

It is the mind which creates the world around us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched.

I think it's an individual thing. Your mountains are my molehills.

A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.

I found out I'd spent my whole life believing things that weren't necessarily accurate. My sisters' memories of certain events are entirely different from mine.

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.

What is my truth can not be your truth.

I always feel like you never know: sometimes you can put out work that you feel is really strong, and other times, you can put out work you think is less strong, and people react to it, so it's kinda like in the eye of the beholder!

The same evidence that is convincing to one person may not convince another.

Your memory is not my memory.

One man's idea of perfect order is another man's chaos.

Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.

The notion that any one person can describe 'what really happened' is an absurdity. If ten - or a hundred - people witness an event, there will be ten - or a hundred - different versions of what took place. What we see and how we interpret it depends entirely upon our individual past experience.

You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.

Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams.