George Santayana Quotes

Memory... is an internal rumor.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

Memory is a fiction we tell ourselves: just a piece of the truth.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

I've worked hard to remember it...The problem is I'm not sure what's real memory and what's my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light. Except I'm sure of my bright light.

I'm so suspicious of our own understanding of the past. I just think that your mind plays absolute tricks on you and fools you every minute of every day. And so when you're talking about the past, you're talking about something that never happened. At least it didn't happen the way you think it happened.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

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.

Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.

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

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.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

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.

Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

Memory is a great betrayer.

Everything I've seen becomes real once it becomes memory. The films I've seen are interchangeable with things that have really happened to me.

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

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.

Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.

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.