A Quote by Oscar Wilde

Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never have happened and couldn't possibly have happened. — © Oscar Wilde
Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never have happened and couldn't possibly have happened.
It's funny what memory does, isn't it? My favorite holiday tradition might not have happened more than once or twice. But because it is such a good memory, so encapsulating of everything I love about the holidays, in my mind it happened every year. Without fail.
As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.
Many of the good things would never have happened if the bad events hadn't happened first.
My writing is a product of how I would interact with things that have happened to me or things that have not happened to me but have happened to somebody else.
I definitely go with the flow because I feel like I have been so lucky, and so many things have happened to me that just never should have happened.
There's never been such a devastating incident as what had happened in America with George Floyd passing away. That's one of the biggest things that I've seen in the world, but things have happened in the past and after a month or two it's just business as normal.
One can never be sure whether a very early memory is a real memory or just the recollection of something which you were told happened.
His mind worked fast, flying in emergency supplies of common sense, as human minds do, to construct a huge anchor in sanity and prove that what happened hadn't really happened and, if it had happened, hadn't happened much.
When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.
Never write up your diary on the day itself, for it takes longer than that to know what happened.
There's always some days you wish things had never happened, like you'd never been born, that sort of thing but I'm not the kind of person anyway that can just sit around and say, "gee, I wish that never happened." I don't ever do that. There's no point. That is a total and complete waste of time.
I was helped by having a verbatim memory of what happened years ago, even if I can't remember what happened a couple of days ago.
... the things that happened in your body were never as bad as the things that happened in your mind.
All of my stories, they don't come from my high school experience, but they're definitely based on things that happened to me in high school, or things that happened to friends of mine, or things that I wish had happened to me.
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.
So, you could often say things are terrible and that accounts for what happened, or things are really bright, and that accounts for what happened. Often, the real explanation for what happened is much more subtle and interesting and involves maybe small shocks or what a couple people did on a Wednesday morning that changed the arc of history.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!