Subjective Memory Quotes

One's memories aren't what actually happened - they're very subjective. You can always make it much better, right?

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

If you ask two people to remember a specific event, the stories are going to vary wildly because we always make ourselves out to be the hero.

Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.

I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

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

Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.

I don't view my memory as accurate or static - and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality - so 'autobiographical,' to me, is closer in meaning to 'fiction' than 'autobiography.'

I don't like nostalgia unless it's mine.

While the past asks only to be remembered, a woman's memory alters on her behalf and in her best interests. Memory - the vain old biddy - cannot resist penciling a few slight, cosmetic revisions in the margins of the past.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

Memories contain hidden editorials on current events.

Every one can remember that which has interested himself.

An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived.

There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles

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.

So many times, I will have people tell me what I did when I was younger. There's so much being written [about] the early Beatles period, and even pre-Beatles period. And people will say, "Oh, he did that because that, and that happened because of that." And I'll be reading and think, "Well, that didn't happen" and, "That's not why I did that." Like anyone's history, you remember what went down better than people who weren't there.

Human beings have only that confusing mass of chemically driven neurological storage to rely on. They're all subjective and emotion-tinged. How can they trust any of their memories?

Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

I know all too well that people only see what they want to see and remember only what they want to remember.

Memory is often less about truth than about what we want it to be.

Memories shift like loose snow in a wind, or are a chorale of ghosts all talking over one another. There is only ever a sense that what is real to me is not real to others, and to share a memory with someone is to risk sullying my belief in what has truly happened.

Memories are just stories we tell ourselves about our past; and that's often why they don't match when we've shared the same experiences with someone.

At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.