Unreliable Memory Quotes

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.

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

However, for story reasons, we needed to represent them in certain ways. One of the things that sort of blew me away that I didn't know when we started is that memories are completely susceptible to change. And this is, you know, one of the many reasons why certain people are trying to get it taken out - eyewitness testimony in court cases because it's very unreliable.

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.

I write unreliable narrators because - paradoxically - they're the most honest, true-to-life kind there is.

If sentiment doesn't ultimately make fibbers of some people, their natural abominable memories almost certainly will.

For 'Frost/Nixon,' everyone I spoke to told the story their way. Even people in the room tell different versions. There's no one truth about what happened in those interviews, so I feel very relaxed about bringing my imagination to the piece. God knows everyone else has.

Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now,the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

You can never beat your own mind when it plays tricks on you.

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.

Memory is a great betrayer.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

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)

Memory... is an internal rumor.

No one's memory is infallible, of course - quite the opposite.

Memory's so treacherous. One moment you're lost in a carnival of delights with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon on puberty, all that sentimental candyfloss. The next, it leads you somewhere you don't want to go.. Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp ambiguous shapes of things you'd hoped were forgotten.

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.

The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.

Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.

I trust anybody's memory more than I trust mine.

It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.

Do not trust your memory; it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip through it.