Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Memories are shaped by imagination and past experience rather than being exact records of facts.
- In plain terms
- What you remember is how your mind interpreted events, not what actually happened.
- What can you take from it?
- Memory is creative, not objective.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- What shapes your memories?
- Can memory ever be true?
Another view
Some events may be recalled accurately without much imagination.
More from Philip Roth
You ask if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the t…
Permalink to quote #23 Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.
Permalink to quote #25 When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech write…
Permalink to quote #22
Related quotes
Perhaps it is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination.
Akira KurosawaAkira Kurosawa quote #7 No, by God, it is false! It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison - a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound …
Ford Madox FordFord Madox Ford quote #9 The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through 'reminiscence,' that is by 'remembering,' by intuitively searching into our own e…
Rollo MayRollo May quote #11