Memory Flaws Quotes

Why is it that we remember with difficulty and without difficulty forget? Learn with difficulty and without difficulty remain ignorant?

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.

isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.

How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.

The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient-at others so bewildered and weak-and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control!

An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

No one's memory is infallible, of course - quite the opposite.

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?

I have a bad memory - thank God for that!

I must say a few words about memory. It is full of holes. If you were to lay it out upon a table, it would resemble a scrap of lace. I am a lover of history . . . [but] history has one flaw. It is a subjective art, no less so than poetry or music. . . . The historian writes a truth. The memoirist writes a truth. The novelist writes a truth. And so on. My mother, we both know, wrote a truth in The 19th Wife– a truth that corresponded to her memory and desires. It is not the truth, certainly not. But a truth, yes . . . Her book is a fact. It remains so, even if it is snowflaked with holes.