George Eliot Quotes

People only remember what they want to remember.

Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.

We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness.

Even as I think of myself as a 'rememberer,' I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better.

You can't trust your memory. You change it to suit yourself.

People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

I do a good job of blocking painful, unnecessary things from my memory.

Few have wished for memory so much as they have longed for forgetfulness.

Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.

There is nothing that makes a man more self-satisfied than a poor memory.

Isn't it fortunate how selective our recollections usually are.

A strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment.

That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.

What part of our history's reinvented and under rug swept? What part of your memory is selective and tends to forget?

We choose to forget aspects of ourselves and then we forget that we've forgotten.

Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.

If I have something I like to forget, then I forget it.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past.