George William Welshire Bramwell Quotes

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

I also held that view for about 50 years, but lately I have been rethinking it and now believe I was wrong.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

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

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

In politics its almost as big a sin to change your mind as it is to be wrong.

Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.

What we recall as children is a version of what's happening around us.

The way we remember people, even their beauty is all so subjective and a matter of perspective.

To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

The moment you label something, you take a step-I mean, you can never go back again to seeing it unlabelled.

I'm not looking for images, They just appear and take on an interest. Sometimes you look at a thing and it has no interest and then you see it in a different way and it has another meaning. Or something that was of no use will become useful.

We do not hear what we hear..., only what we remember.

The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. -Laura Ingalls Wilder, author (1867-1957)

When you're right, nobody remembers. When you're wrong, nobody forgets.

Perception is a selective act of attention and interpretation.

It is always difficult, even with the best will in the world, to look back a long way and see anything resembling the truth.

The way you remember the past depends upon your hope for the future.

You see what you expect to see, Severus.