Laura van den Berg Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.

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

While the past asks only to be remembered, a woman's memory alters on her behalf and in her best interests. Memory - the vain old biddy - cannot resist penciling a few slight, cosmetic revisions in the margins of the past.

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.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.

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

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.

You can't recover memories of a missing event. That's a fallacy.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

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

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

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

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.