Mental Reconstruction Quotes

Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.

It's like your children talking about holidays, you find they have a quite different memory of it from you. Perhaps everything is not how it is, but how it's remembered.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

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.

I became comfortable with what I knew would be the process of trying to pick up the pieces of brain that were in the rubble and tried to make some mosaic out of the pieces and that that would be the trajectory.

it it strange, suddenly having a memory come back out of nowhere. you think you're going crazy; you wonder where this recollection has been hiding all your life. you try to push it away, because you think you've hammered out the whole timeline of your life, but then you see that one extra moment, and suddendly you are breaking apart what you though was a solid segment, and seeing it for what it is: just a string of events, shoulder to shoulder, and a gap where there is room for one more.

Waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.

The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

The Second World War had really devastating effects for much of Europe. It really didn't take them very long to reconstruct state capitalist democracies because it was in people's heads. There were other parts of the world that were pretty much devastated and they couldn't do it; they didn't have the conceptions in their mind. A lot of it is human consciousness.

Memory is often less about truth than about what we want it to be.

Once the fired stone is out of the kiln, it is still possible to mentally reconstruct it in its original form.

If she possessed any memory whatsoever of the days when she'd been whole, her shattered recollections were scattered across the darkscape of her mind in fragments so minuscule that she could no more easily piece them together than she could gather from the beach all the tiny chips of broken seashells, worn to polished flakes by ages of relentless tides, and reassemble them into their original architectures.

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.

We're not aware of changing our minds even when we do change our minds. And most people, after they change their minds, reconstruct their past opinion - they believe they always thought that.

Memory narrativises itself.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough you can remember anything, whether it really happened or not.

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.

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

You want to sing this song. And so it goes on until eventually, after - well, however long it can take - sometimes a few days, sometimes months - you piece the whole thing together.

It was as if I had thought all along I was a complete picture and he had revealed I was a puzzle and had taken me apart and put me back together again.