Memory Inaccuracy Quotes

Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

If you ask two people to remember a specific event, the stories are going to vary wildly because we always make ourselves out to be the hero.

Memory is slippery. It bends to our understanding of the world, twists to accommodate our prejudices. It is unreliable. Witnesses seldom remember the same things. They identify the wrong people. They give us the details of events that never happened. Memory is slippery, but my memories suddenly feel slipperier.

Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.

Passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones.

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.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

Memory is a great betrayer.

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 change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

I have a strong memory of my early childhood. I can remember life before I was two. I remember being toilet-trained like it was last week - and it wasn't last week.

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

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

Memory is often - perhaps usually - a distorting lens: what we think we remember isn't the way it was at all. It's what we'd like to remember.

I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory, you are already in the realm of fiction.

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

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances

there simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.

Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.