Memory Distortion Quotes

Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.

Never go back to a place where you have been happy. Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.

The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.

Nostalgia is a seductive liar.

The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.

A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemd a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore... Warm with life, hopeless unstable.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

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.

It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.

Flee and your bad behavior will be fixed in people's minds. Return, seem in goo spirits, and everyone will doubt their own memory of events.

It's really easy, once somebody passes away, for the tales about them to become taller, the good ones and the bad ones.

History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead

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

You'll remember every damn loss. But the wins? You don't necessarily remember.

The streets looked small, of course. The streets that we have only seen as children always do I believe when we go back to them

When I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.

If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it'll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie.

Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories.

When you revise history, you lose it.

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.