It's like your children talking about holidays, you find they have a quite different memory of it from you. Perhaps everything is not how it is, but how it's remembered.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
A lot of people can't remember things because they weren't actually there to begin with - they don't take it all in.
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
It's hard to separate your remembered childhood and its emotional legacy from the childhoods that are being lived out in your house, by your children. If you're lucky, your kids will help you make that distinction.
It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.
As people get older and fall out of the spotlight, people's memory of them changes.
Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present, which seldom happens to us.
So much of memory comes from the beginning of our lives when we know the world for the first time with a kind of clarity. It is that discovery of the past in the present on which a writer depends again and again as if our lost childhoods, like the surprising cyclamen plant, are forever opening new blossoms.
Memory is the thing you forget with.
Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Even as I think of myself as a 'rememberer,' I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better.
No opposing quotes found.