Julio Cortazar Quotes

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

I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience, but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up, because you're filling in spaces.

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

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

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

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

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

Memory is, of course, a trickster.

I love that the idea of examining memory, and the way memory is edited was made more interesting because it was being filtered through a writer.

My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important.

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

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

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

Our memories are independent of our wills.

Memory - the very skin of life.

For as long as I can remember, I've had memories.

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

Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

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.

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 is imagination pinned down.