Fay Weldon Quotes

But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.

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

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

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

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

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

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

Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.

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

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.

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.

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.

The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.

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

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.

Isn't it fortunate how selective our recollections usually are.

Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.

I know all too well that people only see what they want to see and remember only what they want to remember.

I remember things the way they should have been.

I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.