Graydon Carter Quotes

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

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

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

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

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

I'm so suspicious of our own understanding of the past. I just think that your mind plays absolute tricks on you and fools you every minute of every day. And so when you're talking about the past, you're talking about something that never happened. At least it didn't happen the way you think it happened.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation.

Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

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 plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if what we did wasn't really very admirable, we tend to forget that it ever happened. A normal human being's grasp on reality is very tenuous at best. Our imaginary lives are usually much nicer.

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

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

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

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.

The more Ronald Reagan repeated a story, the more he believed it and the more he resisted information that undermined premises.

People talk from memory and memory often plays false.

Memory is often less about truth than about what we want it to be.

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.