Memory Construction Quotes

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.

History will only ever be partial, to a large extent history tells us what we think should be remembered and what should be forgotten, I find that really problematic.

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

The 'politics of memory' policy appears to work largely by insinuation.

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.

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.

How we remember changes how we have lived. Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives.

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

But honestly, much of the work that I have done has had some impact on me. It's something that I have realised only later. I also find it amusing that the memories of actors are so consciously constructed around what happened to that piece of work, in terms of audience reception or box-office results.

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future.

History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.

It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you're telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

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.