Paula Hawkins Quotes

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.

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.

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

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

Our study showed that the false memory and the genuine memory are based on very similar, almost identical, brain mechanisms. It is difficult for the false memory bearer to distinguish between them.

Some people will believe anything if you whisper it to them.

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

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.

Doubting what you see is a very odd experience. And doubting what you remember is a little less odd than doubting what you see. But it's also a pretty odd experience, because some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them, and that happens to be the case even for memories that are not true.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events.

Propaganda is the art of persuading others of what one does not believe oneself.

Invented memory is a subject that fascinates me.

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.

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

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.

Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation.

People are more likely to believe a big lie than a small one.

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

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

The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.

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

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

What is it men cannot be made to believe!

By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell - and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.