my husband, who is a lawyer, is very careful with words and with the truth. He thinks that the truth exists, and it's something that is beyond questioning, which I think is totally absurd. I have several versions of how we met and how wonderful he was and all that. At least twenty. And I'm sure that they are all true. He has one. And I'm positive that it's not true.
...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.
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)
At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.
The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.
Can I remember "I remember lots," I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.
There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told and what is true.
Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.
there simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.
Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
