Pete Docter Quotes

However, for story reasons, we needed to represent them in certain ways. One of the things that sort of blew me away that I didn't know when we started is that memories are completely susceptible to change. And this is, you know, one of the many reasons why certain people are trying to get it taken out - eyewitness testimony in court cases because it's very unreliable.

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

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

Every time you recall a memory, you're basically making another copy of it and, at that same point, it is susceptible to new changes and adaptations.

One can never be sure whether a very early memory is a real memory or just the recollection of something which you were told happened.

Plus, according to my mother, memories change like people do, especially if there's enough alcohol involved-Aphrodite

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

Passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones.

If memories were indeed like what a camera records, they could be forgotten, or they could fade so that they are no longer clear and vivid. But it would be difficult to explain how people could have memories that are both clear and vivid while also being wrong. Yet that happens, and it is not infrequent.

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.

You can't recover memories of a missing event. That's a fallacy.

As soon as anything is processed by memory, it’s fiction.

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

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

There are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture was, perhaps, imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrance.

Memory changes as a person matures.

The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.

Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.

Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths.

It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.

Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now,the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.

Memory is, of course, a trickster.

Some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them. And that happens to be the case even with memories that are not true.