Reconstructive Memory Quotes

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

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.

The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.

People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.

The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

I love that the idea of examining memory, and the way memory is edited was made more interesting because it was being filtered through a writer.

Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.

Memory is a great betrayer.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

Recalling a memory is not like playing a tape recorder. It's a creative process.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

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

Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.