Rollo May Quotes

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

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.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

I admire 'Adventure Time' for being a piece of art in the way that I think art should be. If you want to see it is poetry, you can, and if you don't, you can watch a fun cartoon.

You don't know reality until someone makes a fiction of it. Reality needs the completion of fiction.

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

Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.

But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.

The power of fantasy is that you can make people understand the deeper realities of our world in a way that they wouldn't normally be able to because of all the things in our world that closes them off.

What we recall as children is a version of what's happening around us.

The left brain is responsible for making order out of chaos, for making sense of things in the world that don't always add up. To do this, it often makes up stories, fantastic confabulations in some cases, just to be able to explain what we're experiencing.

Filmmaking is not about what we see - it's a very misconceived notion; it's about what we don't see.

Your brain forms a story and, if you're lucky, there's a line where the story takes over the brain. You don't even know what you have.

Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.

In my mind, there's usually a fairly definitive kind of narrative when I write. But I don't want to enforce that on other people. I think that's why I like using metaphor so much.

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

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

The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

A non-event ... is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means.

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