Selective Recall Quotes

Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.

It's odd the things that people remember. Parents will arrange a birthday party, certain it will stick in your mind forever. You'll have a nice time, then two years later you'll be like, 'There was a pony there? Really? And a clown with one leg?'

Had we a privilege of calling up by the power of memory only such passages as were pleasing, unmixed with such as were disagreeable, we might then excite at pleasure an ideal happiness, perhaps more poignant than actual sensation.

Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.

I could forget that part, but it had to have been true.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

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.

Incongruous information is discarded, and supporting information is eagerly retained. Our memory actually ends up skewed: we are better able to process and recall the facts that we are motivated to process and recall, while conveniently forgetting those that we would prefer weren't true.

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.

I prefer selective memories. Some songs and some co-workers are all that I want to remember, as memories are not always so pleasant.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches.

Memory is a crazy woman who hoards colored rags and throws away food.

Whereas in a memory you edit things out and sort of restructure the things to seem a little bit more heroic, or to focus on particular aspects that magnify or reduce certain things.

You still remember your SAT scores. And everybody else does too. Everybody's forgotten everything about themselves, everything else about high school. They remember their SAT scores.

People don't really absorb everything they read or hear. They just look at it quickly, and then they choose to remember what they want to remember.

You know what nostalgia is, don't you? It's basically a matter of recalling the fun without reliving the pain.

Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.

When you're an expert in a subject, you can retain new factoids on your favorite topic easily. This only works for the subjects you're truly passionate about, though. Baseball fans can reel off stats for their favorite players, then space out on their own birthday.