Quotes About Memory

We are alive, but what is left of us?

On the way home from school, we stop off for a slice of pizza -- Phoebe's treat. She says there's an upside to what they did to me today. I've marked my place in the annals of school history. She says, "They'll never get that bloodstain out.

perhaps they will remember Chris Creed and they will find their tolerance, their compassion.

There is something very cool about writing your worst memories through someone else's eyes. You start to see what happened to you... almost as if it happened to somebody else. Especially if that made-up person is nice, it's a great exercise because there are many mean people in this world.

A few modern philosophers…assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism….With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.

With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.

Dreaming her way backward in time, resurrecting images, the young girl realized, with wonder, that the absent are always present, that you don't make them go away simply because you get on a train and head off in a particular direction.

Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Other are required, other perspectives, but even so our most important ceremonies – birth, love, and death – are secured by whomever and whatever is available. What chance, what caprice!

Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light. . .

and thus they selectively remember parts of their life, focusing on those parts that support their own points of view.

between the conscious lie to fool others and unconscious self-justification to fool ourselves, there's a fascinating gray area patrolled by an unreliable, self-serving historian—memory. Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

To show how memory changes to fit our story, psychologists study how memories evolve over time: if your memories of the same people change, becoming positive or negative spending on what is happening in your life now, then it's all about you, not them. This process happens so gradually that it can be a jolt to realize you ever felt differently.

Confabulation, distortion, and plain forgetting are the foot soldiers of memory, and they are summoned to the front lines when the totalitarian ego wants to protect us from the pain and embarrassment of actions we took that are dissonant with our core self-images:

False memories allow people to forgive themselves and justify their mistakes, but sometimes at a high price: an inability to take responsibility for their lives.

Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories.

Conway and Ross referred to this self-serving memory distortion as "getting what you want by revising what you had." On the larger stage of life, many of us do just that: We misremember our history as being worse than it was, thus distorting our perception of how much we have improved so that we'll feel better about ourselves now.15 All of us do grow and mature, but generally not as much as we think.

Their stories, so different on the face of it, are linked by common psychological and neurological mechanisms that can create false memories that nonetheless feel vividly, emotionally real. These memories do not develop overnight, in a blinding flash. They take months, sometimes years, to develop, and the stages by which they emerge are now well known to psychological scientists.

Cognitive psychologist Maryanne Garry finds that as people tell you how an event might have happened, it starts to feel real to them. Children are especially vulnerable to this suggestion.

This small story illustrates three important things about memory: how disorienting it is to realize that a vivid memory, one full of emotion and detail, is indisputably wrong; how even being absolutely, positively sure a memory is accurate does not mean that it is; and how errors in memory support our current feelings and beliefs.

Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

Ian's discomfort was followed by a memory of a conversation he once had with Aunt Lillian about the indignities she had suffered as a young woman from the attention of men. He had not until this moment considered what it must have actually felt like.

Ultimately what remains is a story. In the end, it's the only thing any of us really owns.

You never stop thinking you might have beaten it somehow, and there were moments when we thought we had. Your husband can be dead years, and you can't stop thinking how you might have beaten it. Or how they could have left ten minutes earlier, or the next morning. Or that damn lighthouse could have flickered through the fog.