David Levithan Quotes

The other day I... uh, no, that wasn't me.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.

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.

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.

I think I'm confused, but I'm not sure!

Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I’ve created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I’m creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too.

Hey, if you can't remember, don't worry about it. I'm having a few memory problems myself in this place. Little things like how long I've been here, what my purpose in life is, which feet to put my shoes on. Stuff like that.

She looked back as well as she could; but it was all confusion. She had taken up the idea, she supposed and made everything bend to it.

At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.

Sometimes when you get older — and I’m not talking about you, I’m talking generally, because everyone ages differently — things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they’re part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they’re not true — why, then you get offended because you can’t remember the first part. All you know is that you’ve been called a liar.

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

Did you ever think about all of the nights you lived through and can't remember The ones that were so mundane your brain just didn't bother to record them. Hundreds, maybe thousands of nights come and go without being preserved by our memory. Does that ever freak you out? Like maybe your mind recorded all of the wrong nights?

I believe what I said yesterday. I don't know what I said, but I know what I think and I assume it's what I said.

One of the curious effects of a bad hangover is that you think you're wrong whether you are or not. Not wrong in particulars, but wrong in general, wrong about everything.

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.

Are you saying you don't love me?" Hazael asked Liraz. "Because I love you. I think." He paused in contemplation. "Oh. No. Never mind. That's fear.

All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don't know anything, and I'm the first one to admit it.

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.

Neural scientists at M.I.T. say they can plant false memories in your brain. No, that is not new. Politicians have been doing that for years. They’re called campaign promises.

Do you ever wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and think, something's not accurate?

I'm a morning "spinner." That's usually when my brain is thinking too much and I don't necessarily see things positively. So I sit myself down and remember that I'm making it up.

We live with a future where every three or four months, we have to question everything. You think you could be the best, or that you're nothing and you don't know what you're doing. It is exhausting.

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.