Nostalgia is a seductive liar.
The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.
recollect, v. To recall with additions something not previously known.
That was part of her, and you used to know it. It's like now you only care about the Alaska you made up.
I'm so suspicious of our own understanding of the past. I just think that your mind plays absolute tricks on you and fools you every minute of every day. And so when you're talking about the past, you're talking about something that never happened. At least it didn't happen the way you think it happened.
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never have happened and couldn't possibly have happened.
I don't have all the facts. And I might misremember. As a matter of fact, after I finished Winter Journal, I realized that I'd gotten someone's name wrong.
Andy Pettitte is my friend...I think he misremembers.
People talk from memory and memory often plays false.
Where race is involved, there is a pronounced and proven tendency in the United States for the majority culture to willfully misremember the history and turn it upside down.
Some people think of the '50s as a time of innocence, but they are misremembering it or reinventing it: if you look at the papers of the time, they are filled with dread and anxiety.
When they thought of me, they always remembered the vacuous Billie Dawn. It was as simple as that.
In the world of speeches and orations, especially historical ones, the persistent misquotation is understandable. You hear a speech. You misremember or mishear a line as something more colorful than it was.
The funny thing with Ophelia is that I remembered her being this really cool, awesome female character when I read 'Hamlet' in high school, and when I went back and read it, no, she's not.
When George Graham was there they complained, harking back to better days, but I think that's a fantasy.
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.
I quoted David Hare one of his lines the other day to illuminate whatever point we were trying to make in the conversation, and I said 'What play was that?' and he said 'It was your line, you said it about a hundred and fifty times in The Vertical Hour.'
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events.
The news is notoriously inaccurate, and our memory of it is even worse.
I did read all my old diaries and was quite surprised by the overwhelming melancholic tone. I remember things being rosier than they really were.
Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
There is no illusion so permanent as that which enables us to look backward with complacency; there is no mental process so deceptive as the comparing of recollections with realities.
There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.
I was an altar boy and heard the Bible being read out repeatedly. The stories have stayed with me, although they're completely remixed in my head. And often, when I do further reading, I'm quite surprised by the difference between the real story and my memory of the story.
