Unreliable Memory Quotes & Sayings

It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust. — Sebastian Barry

He past is only an unreliable memory held in the present. The future is only a projection of our present conceptions. The present itself vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it. So why bother with attempting to establish an illusion of solid ground?.. — Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

I've told you once I would not force you to my will ... When we become lovers, it will be because you desire as much as I
-Richard — Susanna Kearsley

I just didn't want to be a loser anymore ...
-Mitsuko Souma — Koushun Takami

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

Memory, if it is anything at all, is unreliable. — Mira Bartok

I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Gentleness is the antidote for cruelty. — Phaedrus

My obsession with accumulation, which at times has taken on the whisper of a psychic illness - as anyone who has experienced the ode to the Collyer brothers that is my 'Vogue' office will concur - began in infancy. — Hamish Bowles

My memory of that day is like television itself, sharp and clear but unreliable. — Wally Lamb

Susannah's memory had become distressingly spotty, unreliable, like the half-stripped transmission of an old car. — Stephen King

Any reward that is worth having only comes to the industrious. The success which is made in any walk of life is measured almost exactly by the amout of hard work that is put into it. — Calvin Coolidge

I believe in a higher force that is within me. — Tobey Maguire

Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals. — Anna Funder

I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe - but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual; so it may be that some of these events I describe never occurred at all, but only should have, and that others had not the shades and flavors - for example, of jealousy or antiquity or shame - that I have later unconsciously chosen to give them ... — Gene Wolfe

America may not be the best nation on earth, but it has conceived loftier ideals and dreamed higher dreams than any other nation. America is a heterogeneous nation of many different people of different races, religions, and creeds. Should this experiment go forth and prosper, we will have offered humans a new way to look at life; should it fail, we will simply go the way of all failed civilizations. — Nikki Giovanni

I read of a Buddhist teacher who developed Alzheimer's. He had retired from teaching because his memory was unreliable, but he made one exception for a reunion of his former students. When he walked onto the stage, he forgot everything, even where he was and why. However, he was a skilled Buddhist and he simply began sharing his feelings with the crowd. He said, "I am anxious. I feel stupid. I feel scared and dumb. I am worried that I am wasting everyone's time. I am fearful. I am embarrassing myself." After a few minutes of this, he remembered his talk and proceeded without apology. The students were deeply moved, not only by his wise teachings, but also by how he handled his failings.
There is a Buddhist saying, "No resistance, no demons. — Mary Pipher

All events of the past withered to mere skeletons, veined and fleshed of fancy. — Ashim Shanker

Memory can refuse to let you forget what you'd like to and run away with what you want to remember. It's an unreliable bitch, or your best friend. Sometimes, it's both at once. — Megan Hart

Then I am choosing to die later instead of dying now. — Karina Halle

Memory, of course, is unreliable, often evil, but it is the source of our identity."--Tennessee Williams — James Grissom

Like the apple bruising Kafka's beetle, each of these pellets of recollection lodged in Moose's flesh, releasing its cargo of memories of all the things he had lost - "Not lost! Gained!" Moose thundered aloud, but now, mercifully, that debate (lost or gained?) was supplanted in his mind by the proximity of Belmont Harbor and the yacht club. Yes, this was the place; Moose eased the station wagon into a parking space, desperate to free himself of its chassis, whose sole purpose, it now seemed, was to hold him still so that these bullets of memory could assault him, enter his flesh and release their shrapnel of foolish and unreliable nostalgia. — Jennifer Egan

If there is a counterfeit, there is an authentic that we need to find and reclaim. — Judy Franklin

When the water is very calm and very beautiful, it won't take a long time that a thick head will throw a stone in it! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Nimander wondered if he had discovered the face of the one true god. Naught else but time, this ever changing and yet changeless tyrant against whom no creature could win. Before whom even trees, stone and air must one day bow. There would be a last dawn, a last sunset, each kneeling in final surrender. Yes, time was indeed god, playing the same games with lowly insects as it did with mountains and the fools who would carve fastnesses into them. At peace with every scale, pleased by the rapid patter of a rat's heart and the slow sighing of devouring wind against stone. Content with a star's burgeoning light and the swift death of a raindrop on a desert floor. — Steven Erikson

Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read. — Darin Strauss

Reading is one of life's great pleasures; talking about books keeps their worlds alive for longer. — Kate Morton

But did you know that eyewitness testimony is often totally unreliable? The human memory only records events through the filter of its own frame of reference. We try to fit the information we receive into schemas, units of knowledge that we possess about the world that correspond with frequently encountered situations, individuals, ideas, and situations. In other words, we often see things as we expect to see them, or want to see them, and not always as they are. — Lisa Unger

Memory - uncorrected, uncorroborated, and (by its very nature) unreliable - is what allows us to retroactively create the blueprints of our lives, because it is often impossible to make sense of our lives when we're inside them, when the narratives are still unfolding: This can't be happening. Why is this happening? Why is this happening now? Only by looking backward are we able answer those questions, only through the assist of memory. And who knows how memory will answer? Who will it blame? Who will it forgive? — Stephanie Kallos

My reflections amount to a love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there. The things for which she was not there have her in them now more deeply because of her absence, and her effect on my way of seeing them. Anytime I note her absence from a thing, she arrives at once, as if summoned, entrenching herself more deeply than she exists in my memories of times when she was there, so that time, the sequence of what really happened, seems to curve around her. — Olivia Sudjic

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. — Holly Black

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers. — Kazuo Ishiguro

As you may know, in this Town, memory is unreliable and uncertain. There are things we can remember and things we cannot remember. — Haruki Murakami