David Halberstam Quotes

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

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

We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.

People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.

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

While the past asks only to be remembered, a woman's memory alters on her behalf and in her best interests. Memory - the vain old biddy - cannot resist penciling a few slight, cosmetic revisions in the margins of the past.

It's like your children talking about holidays, you find they have a quite different memory of it from you. Perhaps everything is not how it is, but how it's remembered.

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

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.

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.

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

People only remember what they want to remember.

When you're right, nobody remembers. When you're wrong, nobody forgets.

That is the beauty of memory, isn’t it? Our reality is always clouded by our perceptions of truth. (Mnimi)

You forget your victories, but you remember the losses.

Perception is reality.

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.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.

Selective memory is surely one of nature's most effective ways of ensuring the survival of our species.

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 have my opinions about the way my father was. But they are my opinions, not necessarily the truth, and they are certainly not the whole spectrum of what this man was going through. It's my young, selfish interpretation of that person.

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

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

It's not a stereotype if it's always true.