Chelsea Cain Quotes

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

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.

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.

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.

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

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

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

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

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.

Your memory is not my memory.

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

Memory... is an internal rumor.

Memories are just stories we tell ourselves about our past; and that's often why they don't match when we've shared the same experiences with someone.

Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

I don't really believe that documentary is objective reality and fiction is all illusion.

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.

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.

I remember my childhood as a horrible time. My mother says that nothing so horrible ever happened to me as the things that I remember.

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

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.

As soon as anything is processed by memory, it’s fiction.

If you ask two people to remember a specific event, the stories are going to vary wildly because we always make ourselves out to be the hero.

When I look back at my life and think about what really happened, my memory is obscured by the stories I've created out of those incidents. In stories, as reality melds with art, the result sometimes feels truer than real life.