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…when we learn that a memory is wrong, we feel stunned, disoriented, as if the ground under us has shifted. It has made us rethink our own role in the story.
|
104 |
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By far the most important distortions and confabulations of memory are those that serve to justify and explain our own lives.
|
105 |
 |
Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories. Once we have a narrative, we shape our memories to fit into it.
|
106 |
 |
…an understanding of memory and self-justification leads us to a more nuanced perspective: a person doesn’t have to be lying to be wrong.
|
108 |
 |
…the more you imagine something, the more confident you become that it really happened – the more likely you are to inflate it into an actual memory, adding details as you go.
|
119 |
 |
Fake memories all ow people to forgive themselves and justify their mistakes, but sometimes at a high price: an inability to take responsibility for their lives.
|
127 |
 |
…we must also be careful which memories we select to justify our lives, because we will have to live by them.
|
127 |
 |
None of us like learning that we were wrong, that our memories are distorted or confabulated, or that we made an embarrassing professional mistake.
|
137 |
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Every marriage is a story, and like all stories, it is subject to its participants’ distorted perceptions and memories that preserve the narrative as each side sees it.
|
229 |
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Thanks to the revisionist power of memory to justify our decisions, by the time many couples divorce, they can’t remember why they married.
|
238 |
