Memory Filtering Quotes

Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

It is only when memory is filtered through imagination that the films we make will have real depth.

I prefer selective memories. Some songs and some co-workers are all that I want to remember, as memories are not always so pleasant.

The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.

Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.

The world comes at me that way - comes at me in clumps of stuff, sometimes little vignettes and sometimes whole stories. And then the rest is erased by the internal filter that erases things for the same reason you'd forget swatting a mosquito.

I never succeed in painting scenes, however beautiful, immediately upon returning from them. I must wait for a time to draw a veil over the common details.

People only remember what they want to remember.

The scenes and events of long ago, and the persons who took part in them, wear a charming aspect to the eye of memory, which sees only the outlines and takes no note of disagreeable details. The present enjoys no such advantage, and so it always seems defective.

I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.

Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.