Louise Erdrich Quotes

I guess everybody's different, but I know that everybody's natural instinct is to remember the bad stuff more than the good stuff.

People don't really absorb everything they read or hear. They just look at it quickly, and then they choose to remember what they want to remember.

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.

A man forgets his good luck next day, but remembers his bad luck until next year.

You can read 50 great things about yourself, but the one bad thing will be what you remember most.

I've come to learn that you could read through one hundred things, ninety of them could be positive, those ten negative ones are the ones you're going to remember, that are going to stand out.

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.

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

As to memory, it is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to our self-love - when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them.

Human psychology is attuned to the negative. It’s called the negativity bias. We dread bad things more than we savor good things.

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.

We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.

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

Even as I think of myself as a 'rememberer,' I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better.

Oh, I don't keep a journal. How you remember an incident is dictated by your emotional state at the time. How you receive the information that is coming in is definitely based on your history and who you are.

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

People only remember what they want to remember.

The problem with me is I read everything, but it's only the bad stuff that stays with me. It's weird, you only need to be told something once and it stays with you.

Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.

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

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.

You know, I can't remember my good reviews. I remember negative ones. They stay in my mind.

Statesmen remember things selectively.

... we do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.

There is nothing that makes a man more self-satisfied than a poor memory.