Gabor Boritt Quotes

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

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

recollect, v. To recall with additions something not previously known.

Human memory is short and terribly fickle.

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

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.

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 deceptive because it is colored by today's events.

People can remember their childhood, but events from four or five years ago are in a never-never land.

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

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

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

Tip-of-the-tongue syndrome is when people almost remember something but need a computer, or someone else, to help them find it. The problem is, our brains have always been terrible at remembering details. They were like that way before the Internet came along.

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.

It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.

When you get old, it's hard to tell what's memory and what you've kind of created in your head as memory, you know?

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

Boy, you know, it's amazing how your brain can turn into a sieve, and you can literally forget episodes that you have shot.

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.

I've a grand memory for forgetting.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.

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.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Selective memory has always been the problem. An insistence on seeing some people and movements as the sum only of their brightest and most glorious moments, and others as unmitigated villains, makes for a vision of history that is tragically incomplete.