Subjective Recall 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.

All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.

I guess what I find so interesting about memory, and its role in a person's identity, is how the attempt to achieve accuracy requires you to remove yourself from your life in an authorial manner.

As I go back and listen, the other girls weren't singing quite like I was.

Every reminiscence is colored by the way things are today, and therefore by a delusive point of view.

Memory runs by its own itinerary, departing and arriving at stations of the past on its own schedule.

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

People only remember what they want to remember.

I remember only what interests me.

Our native susceptibilities and acquired tastes determine which of the many qualities in an object shall most impress us, and be most clearly recalled. One man remembers the combustible properties of a substance, which to another is memorable for its polarising property; to one man a stream is so much water-power, to another a rendezvous for lovers.

We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.