Selective Memory 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.

Nostalgia is a seductive liar.

The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.

Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.

Now I am in my eighties, and I have known the joys and sorrows of a full life. Age, however, has its privileges. One is to reminisce, and another is to reminisce selectively.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit.

If we want to be proud of our country, if we want to be proud as Americans, if we want to be proud of our history, then we can't talk about the things that are inconsistent with pride, about which we can have no pride.

If a man owes me money, I never seem to forget. But if I do the owing, I somehow never remember.

I don't remember all my successes, but I do remember failures.

Ironically, tendency to ignore inconvenient facts and unwelcome evidence is actually President Reagan's true legacy, as I noted in 'The Nation' back in 2000, before the current right-wing mania for President Reagan gained its full force.

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition of our existence. If the lore of the transmigration of souls is a true one, then these, between their exchange of bodies, must pass through the sea of forgetfulness.

They always remember the last thing you do. They don't remember the things before.

The more Ronald Reagan repeated a story, the more he believed it and the more he resisted information that undermined premises.

One's memories aren't what actually happened - they're very subjective. You can always make it much better, right?

To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills.

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.

Keep the best, forget the rest.

The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.

Remind a man of what he remembers, and you will make him forget it.

If I have to have a past, then I prefer it to be multiple choice.

I've seen people around me write books, and somehow they're always in the center of everything that happened; they were the one who made it happen. There's been a lot of those books that didn't really interest me much.

The great times were never as great as they seem in the rearview mirror.

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.