Gunter Grass Quotes

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.

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.

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.

Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.

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

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

How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.

Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.

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.

If memories were indeed like what a camera records, they could be forgotten, or they could fade so that they are no longer clear and vivid. But it would be difficult to explain how people could have memories that are both clear and vivid while also being wrong. Yet that happens, and it is not infrequent.

Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.

You can do fascinating things with the tricks memory can play and tell. People can come to believe things which didn't happen at all if they're told them enough times.

One can never be sure whether a very early memory is a real memory or just the recollection of something which you were told happened.

People only remember what they want to remember.

isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

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

Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

Memory is slippery. It bends to our understanding of the world, twists to accommodate our prejudices. It is unreliable. Witnesses seldom remember the same things. They identify the wrong people. They give us the details of events that never happened. Memory is slippery, but my memories suddenly feel slipperier.

Doubting what you see is a very odd experience. And doubting what you remember is a little less odd than doubting what you see. But it's also a pretty odd experience, because some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them, and that happens to be the case even for memories that are not true.

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

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

Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved.